Conquistador (84 page)

But driving straight away from him was a bad idea. Zero-deflection shot . . . His foot came down on the firing pedal.

“Tom, the transports!” Adrienne called urgently from where she rode with her head and shoulders out of the commander's hatch.

As she spoke he heard thumps on the roof of the turret, and the gunner's hatch popped open. He looked up, and saw Sandra Margolin's pale, strained face; she climbed down across him—which would have been interesting, under other circumstances—and then dropped to crouch on the floor of the turret basket. She even muttered an apology as she did it. He checked quickly to see that she wasn't in a position were she'd be in the path of the gun breech or loader.

Adrienne went on sharply: “Tully, Sandra's here. Get us out on the runway.
Now.
”

Tully did, straightening the wheels and hitting the accelerator. The engine was a three-hundred horsepower turbocharged diesel, and the twelve-ton vehicle had acceleration like a jeep. It had a lot more inertia, though, and Tom braced himself with a foot and a hand as it bounced over the ditch on the side of the road, over several bumpy objects—he resolutely didn't think of them as human bodies, probably still alive until a dozen tons rolled over them—and across the strip of dirt. The fence beside the runway was chain-link, with barbed wire on top.

“Close the hatch!” he called to Adrienne as the fence loomed up in the field of the gun screen; you could get decapitated by something like that, if you weren't careful.

She dropped down, pulling the hatch after her; the Catamount lurched as they struck the wire. Some of it broke in a shower of sparks; one of the thick timber posts snapped across and tumbled out over the dirt runway, dragging open a section like a huge door. The Catamount swayed to one side as Tully cut a sharp turn—he wasn't used to driving something this heavy or overpowered either, but Jesus, Odhinn and Almighty Thor witness he was doing a good job!—and hit the gas. The Catamount surged forward like its namesake, going after the sixth transport. The big plane had its ramp up, and the rising scream of its engines came even through the closed hatch.

Tom Christiansen had ridden in a lot of C-130 transports, a couple of them into places where they thought there might be hostiles waiting near the landing fields with heat-seeking missiles. He could imagine
exactly
the fear and confusion aboard the big aircraft, the dim light and crowding and the mind-numbing noise.

And he could imagine exactly what the hundred-odd men packed into it cheek to jowl were about to experience.

The aiming pip slid across the flat rear of the Hercules, eight hundred yards away to the west. It tilted as the nose left the ground. . . . And Tom's foot hit the firing pedal.

BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!
The first burst of three rounds hit the thin aluminum of the closed ramp like a giant blade. The ramp dropped open as the shells cut the couplings, shedding great rooster tails of sparks as it dragged on the ground.

BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!
Flashes as the shells exploded in the troop compartment. Tom's lips writhed back from his teeth in a grimace of horror.

He hit something vital this time, the control cabin or the hydraulics. The huge aircraft stopped accelerating away; it tried to turn sharply left while it was traveling faster than a race car, and then pitched over onto one wing as it overbalanced. There was an explosion of sparks, probably from one of the props beating itself to death against the ground, then a real explosion—vaporized kerosene from one of the wing tanks hitting something white-hot. Tom flung his hand up in a reflex action, even though there was nearly a thousand yards of space and a quarter-inch of armor plate between him and the holocaust that followed. A towering ball of flame enveloped the Hercules, and engines and part of a wing flipped out of it. The armored car rocked back, harder than it had from the recoil of its own weapon, then surged forward as Tully hit the brakes. The frame of the C-130 showed again for a moment, and then the stored munitions on board went off; bits and pieces flew into the air, trailing fire and white smoke through the night.

“Jesus,” Tom whispered. “A hundred and thirty men.
Jesus!
”

“Tom!” Adrienne said sharply.

“Yah,” he replied, scrubbing a hand across his face.

Tully gave a rebel yell and swung the car around in a tight leaning circle—not
quite
on one side's wheels—and they raced back down the airstrip. Tom turned the turret ninety degrees, waiting as the motion dragged the sighting pip across the remaining five C-130s. Those were empty of troops, and probably abandoned by their three-man crews at this point. It wasn't necessary to destroy them either, just to put a couple of shells into their noses. They wouldn't be going anywhere after that.

The screen let him see how the bows of each peeled back as the shells hit and exploded—at less than a hundred yards, he was putting them right through the windscreens into the control cabins of each. Some of them caught fire, in a low-intensity way, but none of them blew up.

The big fuel store
did
blow up when he put a couple of rounds into it; the huge pyre reached into the night, like the funeral of Giovanni Colletta's blood-thirsty ambitions. It also cast a good deal of light; someone opened up with a light machine gun, and the bullets beat on the hull like iron hail on a bucket. He backtracked along the chain of tracer rounds and discouraged them with a couple of rounds.

“Well, now, do we go help Good Star, or do we just drive out into the desert and watch the lovely fireworks until it's time to meet up with Jim and Henry?” he said.

“Neither,” Adrienne said tautly. “Nearly half of them got off the ground. There's still a chance they could pull it off—or at least kill a lot of New Virginians.”

“Damned right,” Sandra called from the bottom of the turret, where she sat with her arms around her knees. “But what the hell can we do about it, Adri? This thing can't fly.”

“No, but those Mosquitoes can,” she said. “Tully, get us over there.”

Tom opened his mouth to object, then slowly closed it. He knew exactly how
that
conversation would go: she'd say she was going, and he could come or stay as he pleased. And he'd get into the cockpit right beside her. Why bother having an argument?

The fact is,
he thought, while his eyes stayed on the screen,
you're doing this from love of country, and I'm doing it for love of
you
, my Valkyie. I don't love this country—not much, and not yet. I may come to, warts and all, if I live here and my children are born here. But you do, and so I have to follow.

Tom's thumb came down on the firing button. The Catamount's turret vibrated as the rasping growl of the machine gun rattled inside it. The third Mosquito shuddered and splintered as the rounds plowed home in the cockpit; he lifted the button after only a few seconds.

“Don't want it on fire, not when we're taking the other two,” he said. “All right, everyone, go!”

The other three left the turret; Tom traversed it and punched up the menu.
Right,
he thought, and scanned down to: LOCK ON TARGET.

The servos whined slightly as he settled the firing pip on the distant shape of the ranch house. Then he touched:

FIRE.

ALL ROUNDS.

TIME DELAY—8 MINUTES.

As the little sign at the bottom of the screen turned to 7:59, he was already boosting himself out of the gunner's hatch and leaping down, just in time to see Sandra running up the ramp and swinging into the copilot's seat of the second Mosquito. Tully was already inside, with Adrienne leaning over him and pointing things out.

She slapped him on the shoulder, vaulted down and ran to meet Tom as he sprinted for the last fighter-bomber.

“They're both hot!” she called. “Pilots and ground crew must have gone off to join the fight.”

“Good,” he said, as he swung into the cramped confines.

With Good Star's men ramping through the night like a pack of wolves—wolves with the minds of men—he didn't envy them one little bit.

“I wish them joy of it, you betcha!”

The Mosquito's copilot seat adjusted via levers underneath, as awkward as those on most cars; Tom had a lot of experience with that, since seats were never set for someone his height. He buckled himself in as Adrienne went through a quick checklist.

Roy's voice came through the headphones. “OK, Adri, I think I can get this bitch off the ground. Landing may be a little rough; it ain't a Beechcraft.”

“Good luck, Roy,” he said. “You too, Sandy.”

“Good luck to us all,” Adrienne said. “We've had more than our share tonight, but a little more wouldn't hurt!” A pause. “Just in case, it's been a privilege to operate with all of you.”

He watched carefully as she opened the throttles; he might, Jesus help him, have to fly this thing himself. It had the same mix of basic and cutting edge tech he'd noticed on the
No Biscuit,
although at least the basic stuff was World War Two, rather than Dawn of Aviation. There was a full set of virtual dials on the thin-film display, though; he could track it and use touches to bring up other data. He did; full fuel load, and full ammo. The armament was eight .50 caliber Brownings with six hundred and fifty rounds each—he'd noticed before that the Commonwealth's military design philosophy tended to the Lots and Lots of Great Big Guns school of thought.

The big piston engines roared, each driving the four paddle-shaped blades into a blurred circle; this design had been a hot ship in its time, faster than most single-seat fighters—but that day had been when his grandfather was popping pimples, reading comics about Superman whupping Nazi butt and worrying about growing hair on his palms. The top speed was about the same as that of a fully loaded C-130J transport.

There are two possibilities: we will catch them or we won't,
Tom thought, as they taxied out past the Catamount; he felt a moment's illogical sadness. It
was
only an inanimate object after all, but it had served them all well.

As the thought ran through his mind, the Bofors gun in the boxy turret opened up; without his night-sight goggles on, the huge flame of the muzzle flash was surprising, and the red dots of the shells seemed to float away as he and Adrienne gained distance.

Good luck,
he thought toward the vehicle, with a wave as they passed and gathered speed.

The tailweel lifted, and suddenly he could look straight ahead, into the darkness. A minute more, and the Mosquito lifted; Adrienne shot the throttles forward to near the redline and banked northward, to give them time to reach altitude—the twelve-thousand-foot wall of the Sierras was only about six miles to the west.

“Gotcha,” Tully's voice said. “Radar positive. I'll follow to your right and rear.”

Tom busied himself with the map display; it didn't have GPS, but the inertial system was good. “We should hit Rolfeston just around dawn,” he said, and looked down.

There were a
lot
of fires around the little settlement, but not many of the distinctive fire-hose flashes of automatic weapons. That was probably good. He could relax enough to be aware of his surroundings; the rubber taste of the face mask, the stink of blood and dried sweat from his fatigues and Adrienne's, even the crystal light of the stars outside the canopy on the ice-clad peaks to their left.

It was getting cold, too; he turned up the heater a bit with a tap of one strong index finger. The adrenaline rush of combat died down, leaving the heavy feeling and slight nausea it always did. Work was the best cure for that. . . .

“Where are the sights for air-to-air work?” he said after a minute of flipping through the display menus. The ones for ground-strafing work were excellent.

Adrienne sighed; it sounded a little odd through the face mask. Then she reached over and flipped up a wire ring with a cross in the center.

Tom felt his mouth drop open for an instant; luckily the oxygen mask concealed it. “Isn't that a bit . . . basic?”

She shrugged, and sounded a bit embarrassed when she replied: “Well, Tom, we never thought these things would have to shoot down aircraft. The Commonwealth has the only aircraft in the world, and we weren't planning on any civil wars.”

“Nobody does,” he said gently; there had been an aching bitterness to the her words.