Defender (17 page)

"Come on, Steve,'' Morgan yelled from the cargo hold. "Put this bloody thing down!"

Mason had selected WHEELS DOWN but was getting no 'Greens' on the board.

"I can't. The landing gear's not responding! I'll have to hover and try to sort it out while you get 'em off."

Four feet from touchdown, Alex Morgan leapt from the door. Fredericks was at his side in a flash. Morgan clapped Fredericks on the back by way of greeting. "Let's get 'em moving, Mike. They're all pretty messed up, so if we don't keep them going they'll lose it completely and we'll never get them out of here. They've been through the ringer today."

"It looks like you have, too," Fredericks replied. "What's wrong with the chopper? Why won't he land?"

"Landing gear's screwed. Arena's bringing Sewa off first." "How is he?"

"Not good."

"What about Turner? Was it you?"

"I wish, but I think big John nailed him just as we were getting out of Pallarup."

"Couldn't have happened to a nicer arsehole," Fredericks grinned. "Agreed," Morgan replied. "Come on, mate. Let's get on with it."

Mason bounced the chopper down hard upon the roof, and Arena, so focused on taking care of Sewa, jumped out with Stanley and another man, hauling Sewa clear and onto the stretcher. Then Fredericks and Morgan began dragging the others off, instilling them with a sense of urgency and confidence that they would be safe as long as they did exactly as they were told, exactly when they were told. With the first half of the evacuees off the chopper in less than 20 seconds, Fredericks led them straight for the stairs and down to the hotel lobby. Morgan stayed on the roof and continued to get the others off, directing each one to follow the stream of evacuees now racing away behind Fredericks. Within a minute, all were off. Turner was staggering along with the help of a couple of men, clutching his jaw, and Arena was disappearing down the stairs leading Sewa's stretcher party.

Suddenly, as Morgan raced the last evacuee clear of the chopper, a powerful wind sheer ripped across the rooftops from the south, and with the controls all but useless now, the Super Puma was hurled straight upwards with a devastating 'whoosh'. Mason struggled at the dead controls to stabilise her as the treacherous winds swept angrily across the rooftop. Helpless, Morgan turned to watch as once again the big chopper was abruptly lifted up and thrown aside, completely clear of the hotel.

Down in the streets below, masses of rebel troops were making short work of the demoralised government soldiers. The rebel force had already secured the main road through town, less than a kilometre from the hotel. The Malfajirian Army didn't stand a chance. They were attempting to organise a fighting withdrawal back towards the port, but the rebels broke through their lines, surrounding small, isolated pockets of resistance and butchering them. Morgan could see it all from his vantage point atop the hotel. He knew that cannibalism was common amongst the rebels, and he had no doubt that many of the dead soldiers would be on the menu that night. Defeated in a war many of them didn't understand, or even know what it was that they were fighting for. Religion ? Diamonds? Dead for rocks. What was the sense in it all?

With that lingering thought, it occurred to Morgan that the helicopter and the hotel were now in full view of the advancing rebel frontline. Rebel forces would be on top of them in minutes.

"Steve, come on!" Morgan yelled uselessly from the rooftop, waving his arms frantically at the pilot. "Land the bastard! Put it down! Put it down!"

Morgan could barely see Mason. He found himself running from side to side across the rooftop, trying to find an angle from which he could see through to the pilot, to catch his eye, to communicate with him somehow. But Mason was hell-bent on saving the crippled aircraft. Starved of fuel, it was everything he could do to keep the chopper airborne long enough to get back over the roof and shut down. Second by second, the helicopter was dying around him as he fought against the savage winds to bring it back over the hotel.

Finally, the big chopper coughed, and coughed again, lurching upon its own centre of gravity. Incredibly, the aircraft was still aloft. But with another violent cough and splutter, the nose of the chopper suddenly dipped, bringing the still spinning rotor blades sweeping across the edge of the rooftop, straight for Morgan. He stumbled and fell. Like a scuttling crab, he moved backwards fast, clear of the path of the gigantic, spinning razor-sharp blades. Missing him by a few feet, they tore through the edge of the roof. Sparks and bits of rooftop exploded everywhere.

Then it happened. The cockpit suddenly erupted into a catapulting ball of fire, arcing high into the black veil of smoke that cloaked Cullentown, before dropping to the road. Through it all, Morgan saw Mason's arms reach up to shield his face as the angry flames of the blaze enveloped him.
In
the same instant, the burning cockpit tumbled earthward and the detached tail section of the defeated beast, with rotors still spinning, burst out from within the inferno, striking at the hotel's exposed rooftop like the attacking venomous tail of a giant crippled scorpion.

Morgan was instantly back on his feet. Guarding his injured ribs with his left hand and grabbing the AKM with his right, he raced for the stairs at full speed while the tail section of the mammoth burning mechanical insect cartwheeled across the roof, heading straight for him.

*
*
*

From a few hundred metres away, behind the advancing rebel lines, Victor Lundt heard the explosion and saw the remains of the helicopter smash onto the street in a spectacular shockwave of flame and debris. The dazzling orange flash of the blast was reflected in his cold eyes. He knew it would be the Chiltonford chopper, with Mason at the controls, but he felt nothing.

Lundt knew things were well and truly turning to shit - that much was obvious. The rebel leadership was floundering at the frontline and the great Baptiste was nowhere to be found. There were pitched battles going on everywhere and, despite the rebels appearing to have the upper hand, the coup could still go either way.
If
it failed, and the government took back control, Lundt would have to make tracks back behind the rebel lines fast, before he ran into anybody from Chiltonford.

After all, as far as the Chiltonford crew was concerned, he was missing presumed dead.

Down in the lobby scanning the faces of the evacuees, Mike Fredericks was abour to head back up to the roof in search of Morgan, when a catastrophic explosion vapourised the entire front section of the Francis Hotel. Fredericks was blown off his feet and hurled into the gaggle of distraught evacuees. Two of Fredericks' guards were killed instantly. The old hotel was torn wide open. People were in a frenzy of terror and panic, clambering over one another in a bid to find safety away from whatever it was that had just destroyed their last line of defence from the battles in the streets.

Disoriented by the blast, Fredericks composed himself, checked those around him, then headed straight for the blazing mess. In the back of his mind he toyed with the notion that it had been a rocket attack, but experience told him the blast was much, much more. No, he thought, pushing through the wreckage of the hotel, something big has just been hit. His mind was racing with a thousand images, thinking of Morgan and Mason, fearing the worst.

"Where the hell are they?"
demanded Fredericks to no-one in particular. With his AKM gripped firmly, ready to fire, not knowing what would confront him, Fredericks bounded over a smoking mangle of concrete, glass and burning furniture in the hotel foyer. The place was destroyed. The stench of a fuel fire and smouldering human bodies filled his nostrils and left Fredericks gagging. The intense blaze fell like a locust plague across the street, feeding greedily on every last morsel of oxygen to prolong its fleeting, malevolent existence. The heat was unbearable. Fredericks stumbled across a discarded AKM and soon located a second, half-buried, high up in a pile of what had been the front wall of the hotel. After a few seconds searching, he found what was left of his men.

Fredericks had witnessed some nauseating sights in his time but this had to be amongst the worst. Seconds before, the two guards had run to the front northeast corner of the hotel to check the progress of the rebel offensive. They had been there only a matter of moments when a rebel soldier had appeared from nowhere and fired an RPG-7, blasting the Chiltonford Super Puma from the sky. Jonah, one of the guards, had reacted quickly to the rocket attack on the helicopter and managed to fire off half a magazine at the RPG man. The rounds hit the rebel squarely across his abdomen, spinning him off his feet in a macabre pirouette. The body was thrown like discarded garbage across the street in a bloody spray. At the same moment, the helicopter's flaming carcass had plummeted from the sky, its tortured wreckage pulverised on impact, splintering across the roadway and propelling a massive orbicular wall of fire through a 150 metre radius, consuming everything in its path, including the front of the hotel. By the time Fredericks found his men, Jonah and Michael, they'd been incinerated, stone dead before their bodies were thrown back into the hotel by the force of the blast. They'd landed in separate charred bundles against the ruins of the south wall. Fredericks had given them their orders less than a minute before, but now he gazed fixedly down at their remains. Choking back the bile, he turned and ran out into the chaos of the street.

The scene outside was a disaster. At least 20 other people had met the same end as Jonah and Michael. A phalanx of charcoaled remains littered the intersection in a horrific pattern, emanating outward from the twisted and blackened skeleton of the Super Puma. The few who had not been killed outright were screaming horribly in sickening unison.

There was little Fredericks could do. Looking on, transfixed, and shielding his face from the flames, he watched the survivors. There they were: rebels, Government soldiers and civilians, all suffering the same indescribable agony in those few remaining seconds, before finally surrendering to their deaths. It was impossible for him to penetrate the flames to help any of them; it would be pointless anyway. They were no more than flaming effigies, arms outstretched, searching for a rapid end. The stench was overwhelming, the trauma of it unforgettable. Swallowing down hard, Mike Fredericks knew exactly what he had to do - the only thing he could do. Taking careful aim, he began firing into the inferno.

With each ominous crack from the A.KM, his rounds found their grateful targets, mercifully hastening the release of dying men and women, barely distinguishable now as human beings. In a matter of seconds, seconds that seemed like hours, his piercing gaze moved from one to the other, squeezing the trigger and following each death from the impact of the round to the collapse of the carcass.

When he had accounted for them all, Fredericks fell to his hands and knees and retched violently.

Morgan was running for his life. The burning tail of the helicopter was slicing across the rooftop towards him, closer and closer, pulverising anything in its path, gaining on him despite every tortured step he took in his attempt to outrun it. His heart was pounding, his chest heaving and his ribs sending flashes of searing pain throughout his body. The tightness in his chest was excruciating. Breathing was almost impossible, but he had to keep going, his mind was alive with the hunger for self-preservation. His surroundings were a blur, he needed something, and he needed it now. Morgan's eyes were scanning, processing every frame from the ocean of images that swam past him at breakneck speed. There had to be options, an avenue of escape.

There it was! A whisper of opportunity. Morgan was thinking fast, calculating the distances, the angles, the timing. There was only the most microscopic possibility that he could do it. But it was all he had. Running as fast as he could, Alex Morgan leapt fearlessly from the rooftop of the Francis Hotel, catapulting himself out
into
thin air five storeys above the street.

Directly beneath him a dilapidated Army truck, spewing dirty grey black exhaust fumes like the smokestack of an old steam train, came careening around the corner of the rubble-strewn streets with a full load of ammunition crates on board, bound for the besieged Government troops further ahead. A large, standard issue, green canvas tarpaulin was stretched tightly across its aging frame. Morgan had seen the truck's noxious plume approaching as he ran across the rooftop.
It
was his only chance. A safety net! Falling fast, he was lined up perfectly to land on the tarpaulin. He prayed the faded canvas would hold long enough to break his fall. Then, with just a few feet to go, he realised, somewhat disconsolately, that the almost prehistoric canvass was a chessboard of disrepair, resembling something more like a child's patchwork quilt than a reliable, life-saving device. Too late he decided that the jump had been a bad idea.

The truck was hurtling down the road at full throttle. The driver focused only upon negotiating his way through the blazing fire ahead, terrified of the battle that he was driving into, oblivious of the unscheduled passenger descending upon him.

Suddenly, as Morgan fell, the vehicle appeared to gain speed and began to sway recklessly from side to side. With a combination of adrenaline overload and ground rush familiar to paratroopers, he was strangled by a fear that he would miss the truck completely, ploughing instead into the asphalt as the vehicle passed by.

With arms outstretched and legs locked together, bent at the knees, he braced for impact, Morgan knew he was about to die.

Mike Fredericks looked up and saw Morgan falling from the sky. "What the hell's he doing?" he said, mesmerised by the surreal scene.

Fredericks couldn't believe his eyes and almost forgot to hurl himself out of the path of the truck. He dived back into the ruins of the hotel foyer and, taking shelter behind a pile of concrete and bricks, turned just in time to see Morgan crash heavily onto the rotting green tarpaulin. It gave way immediately, crumbling beneath the force of his impact. He hit the rusted tubular framework under the canvas like a ton of bricks, the entire left side of the frame buckled, causing the canvas to sag and tear. He bounced, then slid straight off the back of the speeding truck, whirling in a tight bundle along the road. By the time he finally slowed and came to a stop, Fredericks was at his side.