by Victor Milán
But destiny, like evolution, is both pitiless and opportunistic. Torrance was weighed in the balance and found wanting. Destiny's advance scout Jacqui Gendron was ever ready to move on.
The American Special Forces soldiers were eyeing her now. Keeping a sidelong watch on his brother, Buddy strutted forward with an exaggerated swagger. "Hey, there, honey, we got a while left to drive. Why don't you and me slip on back to the rear and I can remind you what that good old white meat tastes like."
"Hey, dude," Delgado the Cat said with an upward flip of the head. "You planning to share that action, aren't you?"
Buddy smirked at him. "The line starts here. My brother goes second. Ain't no Lynko takes sloppy seconds to no greaser."
The Cat's face contorted. He reached for his knife.
Tex let the feed-tray cover fall on a fresh belt of linked 7.62 and swung the machine gun to bear on him. "Easy there, boy. We're all brothers in socialism. I'm already tore up with grief at beating the shit out of a former beloved comrade-in-arms. No tellin' what it would do to me to blow one away, even if he is a chickensquat Cuban."
"Guys," Simms said urgently. "Guys, stop this."
Jacqui pressed herself against Pete.
He didn't look at her. He was a beau ideal hero-warrior-jock, what every Youth League leader and American high school coach wanted his charges to be. He personified the Spartan virtues they never tired of proclaiming—in fact, he possessed Spartan virtues Coach and the YLs didn't know the Spartans had. To him a woman's purpose in life was to serve as outlet for urges that couldn't otherwise be satisfied, and to breed more soldier ants.
Jacqui hit him and bounced. She knew it. She looked fearfully around her, wondering how far this would go. These really were hard men; whatever of civilized restraint had been socialized into them had carefully been socialized back out again by the military machines of two nations, and they were zazzing on a violence high like crystal meth.
Delgado took his hand away from his knife. Tex laughed and pulled the Maremont back across his knees.
Georgie, who had had his back pressed to the fuselage next to Tex, slipped over to sit by Jacqui, hemming her between himself and Pete.
"C'mon, honey," he said. "Let me take you away from this."
Jacqui clutched Pete's arm. "Please."
He deigned to turn his sculpted head. His ice-blue eyes stared right through her.
The verti jerked to impact.
"What are you doing?" Dr. Shih Tai-Yu was frankly astounded that she was able to ask the question in a perfectly level tone of voice. She had never been particularly comfortable flying, and no pilot of any airliner she had ever ridden in had flown his aircraft over another and bounced his underside off the top of it.
Kolya was showing a chipmunk peek of incisor beneath his mustache as he chewed his lip in concentration. "Trying to force him down."
"Oh."
You insisted on coming along, said that hateful voice that dwells inside her head, and everybody's. See what happens when you try to do something effective?
Three hundred meters from the carnage in Timur's pavilion, a hand had grabbed her and drawn her between some tents. She found herself confronting Timur's Pushtun orlok, Sher Khan, who was as tall as the twin monstrosities back in the tent but nowhere as fat. He had men from Eddie's regiment backing him.
Marveling at her own composure, she quickly described the death of Timur and the commandos' arrival, and how she had escaped amid a horde of petitioners fleeing the interlopers' guns. The Afghan took it in, calling occasionally upon God to witness the perfidy of League and Americans alike.
Then she saw an unexpected side to the ragged rebel forces. Using satlink voice communications augmented by runners, Sher Khan quickly discovered that the aircraft which had brought the raiders were parked in the desert on a ridge just north of carnp. He also got in touch with a truckload of volunteers Aliyev the Kirghiz had sent to follow Eddie back to camp in case he needed help.
Working with calm economy—aside from the pious interjections—Sher Khan took control of the scattered and confused Turkestani Defense Forces in the tent city. He sent several hundred north to catch the raiders on their landing zone and play anvil to the Jagun 23 hammer just about to arrive, and led the rest in an encircling movement converging on Timur's tent in the center of camp.
The intruders were already withdrawing as they got there. Word had just come from the north that the Nikolays had surrendered quickly when they found themselves surrounded, and that two vertis had been captured.
The two odd aircraft Shih had seen parked outside Timur's tent when she fled were just tipping their engines horizontal and banking away to the north when Sher Khan burst through into the maydaan or central plaza with Shih panting at his heels.
A breath stuck in her throat when she saw the open car parked before the tent. It hadn't been there when she left. Lying across the passenger seat was a funny-looking rifle, very like the one that was Eddie Randolph's current favorite toy.
Inside she found Sher Khan standing over Ali's dead body with tears dripping from his beard. "Hurry," she said. "They have taken Eddie."
"But how?" he had asked, dabbing his eyes with the tail of his kameez. "We have no planes."
"Yes, we do! Your men just took them."
"Bismillah, yes! Ah, but what honest man ever profited from the counsels of the Chinese? We have no one to fly the Devil's craft."
"Oh, yes, we do."
The nose of the enemy verti was just visible beyond their own craft's snout. It looked terribly close.
"So how about it?" Kolya asked, not looking away from the windscreen. "Do we keep trying just to drive him down? It's a pretty crazy thing to be doing. You are real sure you want to?"
Shih Tai-Yu watched a trickle of sweat crawl out from under his headset and down his rugged face. She didn't think it was from the heat. The craft was bucking in the draft of the other's props, and he seemed to be keeping them in formation by strength of will alone.
What is Eddie Randolph to you? her interior voice asked. And the answer was, not much, perhaps. She found him attractive, and she found him amusing. He was a friend.
She had said good-bye to too many friends, and not had the chance to say good-bye to too many others. She saw Timur lying dead in the tent, saw unarmed people fall before the casual guns of the men who now rode the other aircraft. She saw the tanks hit Gate of Heaven Square.
She had seen enough.
"I'm sure," she said, with a convulsive nod. "Force them down."
Kolya grinned. "I was hoping you'd say that," he said. "Hang on."
Chapter FORTY-FIVE
Pete Yermakov stood behind the pilot's seat, staring up at the squealing, thumping, crashing sound. "What is it?" he demanded. "What's going on?" For all his consummate strengths and skills, this was a situation he could do nothing to control. It had him near frantic.
"Bastard's trying to force us to land," the pilot said through clenched teeth.
"Won't he batter himself to pieces?"
"Undercarriage is strengthened to take the shock of landing. He can just bang hell out of us."
The American at the controls kept banking the plane right and left and right again. The unseen aircraft kept pace, kept bumping it from above like an amorous killer whale, driving it ever lower. The pilot chopped his throttle. The craft slowed dramatically. The nose of the other verti appeared at the top of the windscreen, then slipped back again.
"Bloody hell," the copilot muttered.
Inexorably the ground was drawing closer. "Why can't you shake him?" Pete asked shrilly.
"He's good. Also he's crazy."
A zigzag line of daylight dots appeared overhead. The copilot grunted and clutched his thigh.
Shih turned in her seat. "What are you doing?" she screamed in Uzbek.
Two of Eddie's riders were holding a third as he leaned out the hatch and cut loose with a Kalashnikov. "We're helping you force them down," one said proudly.
"If you kill the pilot and crash the aircraft, will that help your orlok, you sons of bearded mothers?" roared Sher Khan.
The youngsters hauled their comrade back inside. "Oh," the first boy said.
Blood welled from the copilot's leg. Realizing what had happened to him, he began to scream. Mostly out of fear and anger; the real pain hadn't hit him yet.
"Fuck this," the pilot said. "I don't get paid enough for this shit." He started to descend, scanning ahead for a flat patch he could settle down on.
Pete whipped out Eddie's Glock 23, which he had been carrying stuck into his web belt as a trophy, rammed it into the pilot's ear. "Try to land and I'll blow your head off, you coward."
"Go right a-fucking-head," the pilot snarled. "Then you play crash-'em cars with this psychotic."
Pete's beautiful face went white. "I could fly this if I had to," he said in a spray of spittle. But he was confident to the point of arrogance, not megalomania. He jammed the pistol back between belt and body armor.
"There's one more thing I can try," the pilot said, "but you'd better be ready to de-ass this bitch in a hurry, just in case."
Pete nodded and dove back into the cabin.
When he sensed the other verti starting to fall away beneath him, Kolya let it go. No point risking a crack-up if the other pilot was surrendering. The bad guy was a pretty decent flier, Kolya had to admit, probably a lot better than he was at flying these hybrids.
But the other verti driver had a severe disadvantage: he cared whether he lived or died.
The two craft had lost speed as well as altitude during their Apache dance. Now Kolya saw the other verti's engine pods begin to tilt upward.
"Yob tvoyu mat'!" he exclaimed. "No, you don't do this." He dove.
"What are your doing?" Shih yelled. It seemed to be her leitmotiv for the day.
"He's trying to touch down in hover—"
Her lower teeth crashed hard against the upper as the verti struck the other craft.
"-—mode," Kolya continued as they bounced high in the air. ' That way they can jump right back up again and run when we start to land."
The other verti plowed into a broad, shallow wadi, raising a bow wave of sand. Proficient to the last, the pilot prevented his ship from putting in a wingtip and flipping.
He even managed to follow approximately the course of the dry streambed.
"But no way they touch-and-go now," Kolya finished with evident satisfaction. The verti lost speed radically as he turned his own engines upright, trading thrust for lift.
He killed forward momentum by kicking the craft into a rudder turn, skidding around the way he had when he'd dropped the first verti, but at a lot more rational speed. "Okay, dushman," he yelled over his shoulder to Sher Khan, "get your men moving. A few at a time; I'll drop 'em in a semicircle. And make it fast—those bad boys aren't gonna be knocking off for lunch down there."
Braced in the hatchway between cockpit and cabin, Pete had ridden out crash-landing standing straight up. "Texas Team, clear the ship," he was shouting as the verti slowed to a stop with a dying scream of sand on polymers. "Simms and Georgie, you've got the prisoner. Everybody else, be ready to move out right now."
He looked at the pilot, who was busy flicking switches. "Can you get her up again?"
The copilot looked at him with a strained face. ' 'Not with that bloody lunatic up there."
"I don't know yet," the pilot said. "Right now I want to reassure myself we're not going to blow up right away. Then I first-aid my right-seater. Then I'll see if she'll fly."
Pete nodded. "Stay tight, then." He started away, turned back. "If you bug out on us, remember we've got satellite communications. You can't even run fast enough to get away."
The pilot's face went darker. "Get the fuck off my aircraft."
Georgie and Simms were just going out the hatch with Eddie slumped between them. The stork-legged Canadian had the quarter-moon shape of a satlink antenna strapped to his back. Not that Pete intended to make use of it. This was his game. He was going to play it out to the last.
The Frenchwoman touched his arm. He fought down the urge to strike her.
"What about me?" she asked.
"Stay here and finger-fuck yourself if you like," he snarled. He jumped out into the white-hot sunlight.
The wadi was about forty meters wide, winding in a vague way to the north-northwest. The team was deployed around the aircraft, communicator headsets and insect-leg mikes in place. Tex had the bipod down on his Marcmont and lay prone in front of the nose, covering the wadi. His brother hunkered by the tail, covering south-southwest. Upper-body bulky from the vest of 40mm grenades he wore over his body armor, the Cat lay in the sagebrush along the meter-high eastern bank.
He called for Pete's attention, pointed east. The enemy ship was lifting up from behind the end of a ridge, its engines in hover position.
"I think he just made a drop-off," Cat said. His heavy-lidded eyes were almost closed against the glare. Like his namesake, he was a thoroughly nocturnal animal. "They've dropped off three other groups, two behind that round hill to the northwest, the first almost due north, probably on the edge of the arroyo."
"Shitfire," Buddy said, "ain't that one of ours?'
"We never should have trusted those BON weenies to guard the LZ," Georgie said bitterly. He had the still semiconscious Eddie facedown in the sand with his boot in the middle of his back and both muzzles of his CAR-15/M-203 combo aimed at the back of his skull. "They could fuck up a wet dream."
"That's a big ten-four," Tex said.
As they watched, the craft curved around, still playing helicopter, touched down out of sight just south of southeast. Dropping another team into the wadi, Pete thought.
"Okay. Cat, you and Buddy strike north along the wadi. Georgie, Simms, keep charge of the prisoner, head up into the scrub on the west bank—"
"Hey, we got company," Buddy called.
Pete looked south. The verti had risen to a couple of hundred meters and was flying slowly toward them.
"It's the eye in the sky," Georgie said.
"Tex," Pete said.
Tex sat up, turned around, swung his big black machine gun up from the waist. He started hosing quick bursts at the aircraft, letting muzzle-jump spread the wealth around.
Kolya Kuliyev banked and dove away as bullets passed through the verti with thin whistling cracks. "Okay, bad idea," he said to Shih, still strapped in the copilot's seat. "This thing isn't a gunship, and it isn't armored, and we don't know what else they may have. I'm not usually the cautious type, but unless we wanna risk stranding our pals, our only option right here is to park somewhere where we can keep an eye on things, maybe lend a hand if things get scaly."
Shih just nodded. Her lips and throat were too dry to actually produce words.
Buddy let out a rebel yell. "You sure showed him, Tex! He's beatin' cheeks, big time."
Pete watched the verti fly toward a mesa a kilometer to the west. "Georgie, Simms, stay here and keep a watch. Give a yell if that thing comes back."
Tex had stood up and was letting his M60 hang from its sling as he dusted himself off. "What about me?"
Pete grinned. "You and me." He pointed with his chin at the round-topped hill two hundred meters northeast. "Straight up that hill."
A molasses grin spread across Tex's vast face. "Rock an' roll. Rock and fuckin' roll."
«
Kolya brought the verti to a feather-light touchdown on the mesa's flat top, just out of sight of the other craft. The morning sun starred the windscreen like a bullet strike. He sighed, feathered his props, and leaned forward to adjust the pillow at the small of his back.
"Now we watch. And wait."
"Yes, Captain Kuliyev," Shih said demurely. She unbuckled herself and stretched, trying to remobilize tension-knotted muscles.
Then she grabbed up Eddie's rotary rifle from the deck beneath her feet, dodged out of her seat, and was gone.
Edd
ie came back from his walk in the dreamtime with the packed-in sensation of lying in sand, sun cascading like scalding water on his face, and something tickling his nose.
He opened his eyes to slits, which was as far as they'd go. An immense fat green-bellied fly doing a careful recon of his nose took fright at the small, agonized motion and buzzed off.
There were dry weeds around his head and voices nearby: "Why don't you call for aircraft to help you?"
Great. The orange-haired French bitch. Timur's ex-squeeze. He thought he'd dreamed her.
He was distracted from a fuzzy fantasy of choking her by Simms's high-pitched voice, Boy Scout polite, as he remembered it: "You see, Ms., we're still deep in rebel-held territory, and the risk from surface-to-air—"
"You see any tanks, babe?" Georgie cut him off. "That's all fast-movers are good for. Tanks and bunkers and other shit you can see from a long way off, and that can't go hide in the bushes where you'll never see 'em again between your first pass and the time you curve back around for a bomb run. We don't need 'em; this is snoop-and-poop stuff." Eddie could feel his nasty grin. "That's where we live. We are the best."
The fuck of it was, it was true. They were the best.
Eddie had made sure of that himself.
Chapter FORTY-SIX
Aliyev the Singer obeyed orders better than his boss did. When Eddie split, he left firm instructions for the old Kirghiz to stay behind in charge, and keep the other sections with him. Aliyev did those things.
As Aliyev saw it, his duty required him to keep the other section leaders on the Syr Dar'ya with him. But Eddie had not forbidden leave. Therefore Aliyev decreed that each section might send five men back to the encampment outside Tashkent on furlough.
And if those men chose to follow their orlok and keep an eye on him... a commander had no right to interfere with what his men did in their free time.
Moon, the small square man with the blacksmith grip who hailed from an ethnic-Korean koophoz south of Tashkent, led five Blue-Sky Riders in a swift march down the wadi. Eddie had taught them well. They moved in single file, slightly staggered, so that a single high-velocity jacketed round couldn't punch them all through at once like doves on a fence. They hugged the eastern bank, to reduce their chances of being spotted and to enable them to take cover quickly if they were. They walked hunched well over, to keep their heads below the bunchgrass and bushes that lined the wadi's banks.
