Whiskey pulled a ping-pong grenade and cocked his arm. A blast smacked him and he fell to the pavement.
Danny Washburn grabbed the grenade from the corpse’s hand and lobbed it into the shadows where it exploded far away from anything.
Jon spotted a Redcoat firing line forming at the edge of the camp just beyond one of the four, parked flying machines. The enemy had regrouped quicker than expected and prepared to fire a volley.
Thump-thump-thump.
The air shook. A wind gusted across the parking lot. A portable light pole tumbled and smashed. Something big hovered above.
A hailstorm of bullets ripped in to the forming line of Redcoats, obliterating their armored bodies.
'You guys need a little help down there?'
Nina’s voice crackled from the rear seat of the Apache to Jon’s radio.
'Damn straight, Ghost Rider. Tear em’ up!'
Trevor sat in the forward seat controlling the gunship's armaments. Gunner and pilot both wore night vision goggles.
Nina swerved the ship around searching for targets.
'Hold.'
She responded to Trevor’s order and held the craft steady.
The rapid-fire cannon whirled and bullets flew. Two enemy soldiers and the parked car they hid behind shredded to pieces.
'Starboard! Starboard!'
Trevor turned the gun sights to his right at Nina’s warning. A trio of Redcoats stood inside the windows of the electronics outlet, apparently thinking the darkness provided cover.
The ‘copter’s gun fired again. Glass smashed, parts of the store’s ceiling fell, and the aliens broke apart. Trevor kept firing, strafing the prone Redcoats in the makeshift hospital ward: no prisoners would be taken today.
Brewer radioed, 'There’s a bunch of them in the other building!'
Nina pulled the helicopter about. The tail rotor knocked over another portable light but she handled the beast with skill, hovering near ground level. Trevor swept the interior until nothing moved.
'Boss! Check it out!' Tolbert yelled and pointed to the sky over the valley.
Jon saw what Tolbert saw: a speck of light flying toward the overrun camp: the only one of the Redcoats' planes off the ground that night.
He frantically waved toward the guardrail. Lori, seeing the signal, escorted Omar to the heart of the camp. The professor had spent a full day smoking cigarettes and observing the big guns from Shepherd’s watch point. While the machines themselves were based on complicated technology, Omar quickly demonstrated that operating the guns posed no challenge.
With an unlit smoke in his mouth, Omar climbed into the gunner’s position on one of the mobile anti-air weapons. He scanned the strange symbols above buttons of various geometric shapes for three seconds, and then went to work.
The barrel elevated, swerved side to side, then down, then up again. The control panel on the anti-aircraft weapon beeped and bleeped.
'Omar…' Jon lead.
The professor muttered, 'What are they going to be doing, Mr. Brewer? No weapons are onboard those ships of their's. Nonetheless, I need one…moment…too…'
With an electronic buzz, a thin line of energy flew from the big gun like an arrow made of light. It hit the flying ship, neatly cutting away its mid section as if magically turning the metal there to dust. The remaining pieces of the craft fell to Earth and exploded.
After sweeping the camp one more time, Trevor and Nina tackled the Redcoat checkpoints one after another where they found alert but confused soldiers. It seemed their discipline worked against them. Had they abandoned their posts and rushed to the camp, the aliens would have thwarted Jon's small strike team and retained control of their artillery.
Instead, the Apache preyed on small, clustered groups of sentries at scattered guard posts and dispatched them at the cost of fifty percent of the helicopter’s thirty-millimeter cannon ammunition and two Hellfire missiles.
While the Apache sought out checkpoints, Omar taught a crash course in alien artillery. Forty-five minutes later the big guns fired again.
Trevor and Nina took position near downtown and served as spotters.
The first shots fell randomly around the city; the aim so poor that the Redcoats-huddled in their defensive positions-did not realize the artillery aimed for them.
Until Omar and his gunners found their mark.
The 1 ^ st Regiment, tightly packed inside the big 'Bicentennial Building,' suffered the worst. Artillery blasts shook the foundation and vaporized support pillars. The inexperienced Commander ordered the evacuation too late. The entire complex crumbled to pieces, killing nearly all the troops housed inside. Those not killed by the demolition, faced a horde of opportunistic ghouls.
Shortly thereafter, Omar aimed for the 3 ^ rd and 4 ^ th Regiments along North Main Street.
The human gunners did not handle the artillery pieces as expertly as the Redcoats. The difference in their success lay in the targets. The Redcoats had tried to stamp out a handful of guerrilla fighters by destroying entire blocks. Their chance of hitting those individuals had been relatively small compared to the size of the area targeted.
In contrast, the Redcoats packed themselves tightly into their points. Every blue bolt that hit one those buildings caught at least some of the enemy soldiers in its blast radius.
Discipline and doctrine were not the only Redcoat traits turned against them that night. The Redcoat artillery had been so intuitively designed that the humans not only learned fast how to fire effectively, but also had no trouble maintaining the barrage: the big energy guns ran on H2o and a special powdery compound added to the artillery much like mixing Kool-Aid into a pitcher of water.
– Dawn brought a dramatically changed battlefield.
Trevor-in the Apache's gunner's seat-watched the landscape scroll below as they flew toward downtown after having refueled at the lake.
Nina-steering the chopper on a steep bank over center city-craned her neck to look down at the broken Bicentennial Building. Omar's artillery barrage had scooped out the center and the outer walls collapsed in. Red- clothed cadavers lay throughout the wreckage.
She said, 'Looks even worse now that the sun's up. Most of them died at their posts.'
'Not all of them; look south.'
Nina did and saw two alien soldiers running from a dozen floating jellyfish creatures.
'Poor bastards,' she joked.
'Hey, no, really, we should thank them. You know how many hostiles they took out in town? Hundreds; maybe thousands, I'll bet.'
They circled for another pass and then flew northeast toward the captured base camp.
Nina said, 'I think I saw something moving over by the boulevard. I want to-oh shit!'
Trevor saw them, too: eight Redcoat soldiers standing in the parking lot of a Bowling Alley. They clearly held the helicopter in their sights.
Nina turned hard and accelerated. Trevor tried to lock-on with the cannon but fired wildly as the chopper bucked.
A volley fired toward the helicopter, but Nina's evasive flying avoided the meat of the shot. A glancing blow hit near the rear-rotor. Alarm bells and warning lights blared in the cockpit; Nina's feet furiously worked the suddenly limp pedals.
'I got it, I got it,' Nina's assurance sounded hollow.
The chopper spun left, then right, all while descending dangerously fast first over residential roofs, then nearly into the side of a Wendy's restaurant.
