from its line of sight and the rocky corner blocked the infrared emissions of her exhausts.
The missile crashed into the cliff face, gouging out a great fall of rock and filling the pass behind the Hercules with dust and smoke.
Sean brought the Hercules back on an even keel once again, gentling her, favoring her damaged wing.
'Any sign of the Hind?'
'No-' Job broke off as he saw the dread shape materialize through the dust and smoke. 'She's there, she's still coming!'
The entire rear section of the Hind's fuselage was twisted askew, and half her rudder was missing. She staggered and lurched through the air, only barely under control and falling rapidly behind the fleeing Hercules. The pilot was a brave man, serving her, keeping her in action to the end.
'WS- fired again!' Job cried as he saw the missile drop from under the stubby wing roots and boost toward them on a tail of smoke.
'She's down!' Job watched the tail rotor of the gunship break away and spiral upward while the body dropped like a spine-shot buffalo bull and hit the trees, breaking up in a tall burst of flame and smoke.
'Break right!' Job called desperately. Although the Hind was dead, her terrible offspring blazed across the sky, bearing down on them mercilessly.
Sean put the Hercules over as hard as she would go. The missile almost missed the turn and went skid din2 wide in overshoot, but it corrected itself and came around hard, spinning out a long billow of silver smoke behind it, and fastened on the starboard number two motor.
For a moment, they were blinded as the smoke of the explosion swept over the canopy and was as suddenly swept away. The Hercules convulsed as though in agony. The missile blast threw her wing up, miraculously knocking her back onto an even keel, and adroitly Sean held her there.
He looked across in horror at the damage. The number two engine was gone, blown out of its mountings, leaving a terrible gaping wound in the leading edge of the wing. It was a mortal blow. In her death throes, the Hercules careered across the sky, dragged around by the asymmetrical thrust of her five engines, the damaged wing flexing and beginning to fold backward.
Sean eased back the throttles, trying to relieve the strain and balance the thrust. He looked ahead, and there was the river, wide and shallow and tranquil above the turmoil of the falls. The first rays of the sun were buttering the tops of the trees on either bank and the crocodiles lay black on the white sandbanks.
Sean flipped on the intercom and spoke over the loudspeakers into the cargo hold. 'Hold on! We are going to hit hard!' he said in Shangane, and pulled his own harness adjustment in tighter.
The Hercules lumbered down heavily, both wings so ( am aged that Sean was amazed that she was still airborne. 'Too fast,' he muttered. She was dropping like an express elevator. They would hit the trees short of the river. He braced himself for losing a wing and the accompanying disruption of air flow, and gingerly pulled on full flap to slow her down.
Far from destroying herself, the Hercules responded gratefully to the additional lift and floated in with a semblance of her old elegance. She skimmed the treetops on the riverbank and Sean switched off the fuel pumps, mains, and magnetos to prevent a fire.
He held the nose high, bleeding off speed, and the needle on the airspeed indicator wound back sharply. The stall warning buzzer sounded, then the deafening klaxon of the landing gear chimed in, trying to warn him that his wheels were stiff up.
The controls went sloppy as the Hercules approached a stall, but they were out in the center of the river, twenty feet up and dropping fast. The crocodiles slid off the sandbar directly ahead, chummg the green water in panic, and Sean kept feeling the control column back and back, fending her off until the last possible moment.
He felt the tail touch the water. The airspeed indicator was right down to forty knots. Mie Hercules stalled and belly-flopped into the river. A solid green wave broke over the nose and washed the canopy, spurting in1hrough the bullet holes.
Both Sean and Job were flung violently forward against their shoulder harnesses, then the Hercules bobbed up and surfed on her belly, slowing down and turning to stop broadside to the current.
'Are you all right?' Sean barked at Job. In reply, Job unbuckled his harness and leaped out of the copilot's seat.
The deck was canted under Sean's feet as he stood up. Through the canopy he saw that the Hercules was floating aimlessly down on the current. Her empty fuel tanks and the air trapped in the fuselage were keeping her afloat.
'Come on!' He led Job back into the main hold and saw at a glance that the cases of missiles were still secured in their heavy cargo nets.
The Shanganes were in a panic, at least two of them injured, writhing and moaning in the puddles of drying vomit on the deck, one with a sharp, jagged end of bone protruding through the flesh of his broken arm.
Sean spun the locking wheel on the emergency hatch and kicked it outward. Immediately the nylon escape chute inflated and popped out like a drunkard's yellow tongue to flop onto the surface of the water below.
Sean leaned out of the open hatch. They were drifting toward another sandbar, and he judged that the water under their keel was only shoulder deep, for he could see the bottom clearly.
'Ferdinand.' Sean picked him out of the mob of mflhng Shanganes. 'This way, get them out!' He saw Ferdinand sober and lash out at the panic-stricken troopers around him, driving them toward the hatch.
'Show them how it's done,' Sean ordered Job. 'And once you are down, get them to haul the hull onto the sandbar.'
Job folded his arms over his chest and jumped feet first onto the chute. He shot down into the water, then floundered to his feet.
The water came up to his armpits. immediately he waded to the Hercules' side and threw his whole weight against it.
One at a time, the uninjured Shanganes followed him down the chute, and at the bottom Job took charge of them. Sean shoved the last trooper through the hatch, then leaped out himself.
low blood warm. As soon as The water was just a few degrees be he surfaced he saw that all the men were straining against the Hercules'floating carcass and slowly moving her across the flow of the river. He added his own weight to theirs, and gradually the bottom shelved beneath their feet and the water dropped to the level of their waists.
The belly of the Hercules ran aground, and she settled heavily as the fuselage flooded. The men dragged themselves onto the sandbar and collapsed in sodden heaps, their expressions dull and bovine from the aftereffects of terror and exertion.
Sean looked around him, trying to assess their position and plan his priorities. The Hercules was stranded high enough to ensure that only the lower part of the fuselage was flooded and that the iles would not be submerged and have their delicate electronic circuitry ruined.
The current had swept them in under the sheer riverbank, against which the summer floods had piled dead trees and drift wood high. The sandbar was merely a narrow strip below the bank.
'We must move fast,' Sean told Job. 'We can expect that the Hind was able to transmit a signal to the rest of the squadron, and they'll come looking for us.'
'What do you want to do first?'
'Unload the Stingers,' Sean answered promptly. 'Get them busy.' Once Sean climbed aboard again, he found that the hydraulic rams on the cargo door were still operating off the batteries and he lowered the ramp.
The weight of each wooden case was stenciled on it, 152 pounds.
'They are light, two men to a case,' Sean ordered, and he and Job rifted them onto the shoulders of each pair as they stepped forward soon as they received it, they trotted down the ramp onto the sandbar and up the bank into the trees. Ferdinand showed them where to stash them and cover them with driftwood.
It took less than twenty minutes to unload the cargo, but every minute Sean was in a ferment of impatience and anxiety. As the last case was carried ashore, he hurried out onto the ramp and peered up at the sky, expecting to hear the approaching whine of rotors and Isotov turbos.
'Our luck isn't going to last,' he told Job. 'We must get rid of the Hercules.'
'What are you going to do, swallow it or bury it?' Job asked sarcastically.
Against the forward bulkhead of the Hercules' hold was a 120ton loading winch, used to drag cargo aboard. Under Sean's instruction four Shanganes ran out the winch cable and used the Hercules' inflatable life raft to take the end of it across the river and shackle it to a tree on the far bank.
While they were doing this, Sean and Job searched the Hercules and stripped it of everykitern of useful equipment, from the first aid kit to the stores of coffee and sugar in the tiny forward galley. With satisfaction, Semi saw that the tropical first aid box was substantial and contained a good supply of malarial prophylactics and antibiotics. He sent it ashore with one of the Shanganes and ran back to the loading ramp.
The dinghy was returning, and still there was no sound or sight of marauding Hind gunships. It was too good to bear thinking about.
'Get everybody ashore,' Sean told Job, and went to the winch controls. As he engaged the clutch, the
