Twice before Smith had gone up against one of those powerful and deadly killers. In both fights he had been lucky to limp away alive and he was not going to be able to rely on stumbling into good fortune again. This time he needed to make his own luck — and that meant taking chances.
He ran on, with his feet flying through the tall grass lining the eastern edge of the runway. The range to the oncoming drone and the four enemy gunmen was closing fast — falling rapidly as they moved toward each other with increasing speed.
Two hundred and fifty meters. Two hundred. One hundred and fifty meters. Jon felt his lungs laboring under the strain. He brought the M4 up to his shoulder and sprinted on.
One hundred meters.
The flying wing came whirring along the runway toward him. All fourteen of its propellers were spinning now, carving bright flashing circles in the air.
Now!
Smith squeezed the trigger on the M4, firing short bursts on the move — walking his rounds across the tarmac toward the startled enemy gunmen. Pieces of concrete and then tufts of grass flew skyward.
They dropped prone and began shooting back.
Jon swerved left, zigzagging away from the tarmac. Bullets tore through the grass behind him and cracked past his head. He dived forward, hit the ground, shoulder-rolled back onto his feet, and kept running. He fired again, then swerved right.
More rifle rounds screamed past, reaching out to tear him apart. One tore through the air close to his face. The superheated gases trailing in its wake slapped his head back. Another clipped his side, glanced off his body armor, and knocked him down into the grass. Frantic now, Smith rolled away — hearing bullets rending the earth right behind him.
In the midst of all the shooting, he heard a deep, bull-like voice shouting angry orders somewhere on the other side of the runway. The last of the Horatii was issuing new commands to his troops.
And then, suddenly, astonishingly, the firing stopped.
In the silence, Jon cautiously raised his head. He grinned weakly in relief. As he had intended, the second drone flying wing, still serenely taxiing toward its programmed takeoff, had come rolling between him and the men who were trying to kill him. For a brief moment they could not shoot at him, at least without the risk of hitting one of their own precious aircraft.
But he knew their self-imposed cease-fire would not last long.
Smith pushed himself up, and crouching low, he moved backward-trying to keep pace with the huge slowly accelerating solar-powered plane. He peered beneath the enormous wing, looking for any sign of movement on the concrete runway.
He caught a quick glimpse of running combat boots through the narrow gaps between the flying wing's five sets of landing gear and its aerody-namicallv shaped avionics and payload pods. Two of the gunmen were sprinting across the wide tarmac, cutting behind the drone in an effort to gain a clear field of fire.
Jon kept backing up, waiting with the M4 tucked against his shoulder and his finger ready on the trigger. He breathed out, feeling his pulse pounding in his ears. Come on, he urged the running men silently. Make a mistake.
They did.
Impatient or overconfident or spurred on by the wrath of the auburn-haired giant who commanded them, both gunmen crossed into the open in the same instant.
Smith opened fire — pouring rounds downrange into the suddenly appalled pair. The carbine hammered back against his shoulder. Spent cartridges flew away from the weapon, tinkling onto the concrete. Fifty meters away, the two gunmen screamed and fell away into the grass. Multiple 5.56mm hits ripped them apart.
And then Smith felt a series of hammer blows punching across his own chest and right flank — a cascade of agonizing impacts on his Kevlar body armor that spun him around in a half circle and threw him to his knees. Somehow he held on to the M4.
Through vision blurred by pain, he looked up.
There, only forty meters away across the tarmac, a tall green-eyed man stared back at him, smiling coldly down the barrel of an assault rifle. In that instant, Jon understood the mistake he had made. The last of the Ho-ratii had expended two of his own men — throwing them forward to draw fire in the same way a chess player sacrifices pawns to gain an advantage in position. While }on killed them, the big man had slipped quickly around the front of the taxiing drone aircraft to strike at him from the flank.
And now there was nothing Smith could do to save himself.
Still smiling, the green-eyed man raised his rifle slightly, this time aiming at Smith's unprotected head. Beside him, just at the edge of Jon's wavering, unfocused vision, the leading edge of the huge flying wing came into view, liberally studded with the plastic cylinders containing its murderous payload.
The fear-ridden primitive part of Jon's brain screamed in silent terror, raging futilely against its approaching death. He did his best to ignore that part of himself, straining instead to hear what it was that the colder, more clinical, more rational side of his mind was trying to tell him.
The wind, it said.
The wind is from the east.
Without thinking further, Smith threw himself sideways. He fired the carbine in that same moment, pulling the trigger as fast as he could. The M4 barked repeatedly, kicking higher with every shot as he emptied what was left of his thirty-round magazine. Bullets lashed the huge flying wing — punching holes in carbon fiber and plastic surfaces, slicing flight control cables, smashing onboard computers, and shattering propellers.
The drone plane rocked under the force of the high-velocity impacts. It began slewing west, slowly turning off the runway.
Terce watched the dark-haired American's last desperate move without pity or concern. One side of his mouth curved up in a wry, predatory grin. This was like seeing a wounded animal thrashing in a trap. That was something to savor. He stood motionless, choosing only to follow his target with the rifle barrel — waiting for his sights to settle on the other man's head. He ignored the bullets shrieking off to his right. At this range, the American could not possibly hope to hit him with unaimed fire.
But then he heard the smooth hum made by the drone aircraft's fourteen electric motors change pitch — roughening in fits and starts as they shorted out or lost power. Bits and pieces of shattered plastic and carbon fiber spun away across the tarmac.
Terce saw the huge plane swinging toward him, veering wildly off-course. He scowled. The American's last gamble would not save his life, but the damage to one of his three irreplaceable attack aircraft would infuriate Nomura.
Suddenly Terce stared in disbelief at the thin-walled plastic cylinders slung under the huge wing, noticing for the first time the rough-edged star-shaped punctures torn through so many of them.
It was only then that he felt the murdering east wind gently kiss his face. His green eyes widened in horror.
Terror-stricken, Terce stumbled backward. The assault rifle fell from his shaking hands and clattered onto the concrete.
The auburn-haired man groaned aloud. Already he could feel the Stage IV nanophages at work inside his body. Billions of the horrid devices were clawing their way outward from deep inside his heaving lungs — spreading their poisons wider with every fatal breath. The flesh inside his thick transparent gloves turned red, sloughing off his muscles and tendons and bones as they disintegrated.
His two surviving men, temporarily secure in their gas masks, looked up at him from their firing positions. Eyes wide in fear, they scrambled to their feet and began backing away.
Desperately he raised his haggard melting face in mute appeal. “Kill me,” he whispered, choking out the words past a tongue that was falling to pieces. “Kill me! Please!”
Instead, panicked by the horror they saw before them, they threw their rifles aside and fled toward the ocean.
Screaming again and again, the last of the Horatii doubled over, wracked by incomprehensible and unending pain as the teeming nanophages ate him alive from within.
