traversing burst. Two of the runners dropped in their tracks. Grinning happily, crooning to himself with the fun of it, Matatu dragged a steel box of spare ammunition belts across the bloody floor and helped Sean reload.
With a fresh belt of 250 rounds loaded, Sean made a sweep with the heavy machine gun. His fire lashed the hillside above him, tracer swirling through the groups of running Frelimo and scatter them
Ing It seemed to Sean as though more than half the Shanganes had survived the mine field and the bloody charge and assault. Roaring wildly with triumph, they were pursuing and harrying the routed defenders.
The barrel of the heavy machine gun was so hot it crackled like a horseshoe fresh from the blacksmith's forge.
'Come on!' Sean abandoned it and jumped onto the rear parapet, ready to follow his Shanganes deeper into the laager and to begin wrecking the Russian service installations.
As he stood poised on the parapet, backlit by the burning fuel tankers, a monstrous apparition appeared in the dawn sky ahead of him. Rising on its glittering rotor, turbos shrieking, a Hind gunship lifted out of its,-4nd bagged emplacement not two hundred meters from where Sein stood. It looked like some prehistoric behemoth. SupernAral and otherworldly it rotated ponderously until the mirrored eyes of the canopy si@5 at Sean and the multiple cannon barrel in the turret below its nose pointed at him like an accuser's finger.
Sean reached down, seized Matatu by the scruff of his neck, hurled him to the floor of the emplacement, then threw himself full length on top of him, knocking the breath out of the little man, just as a gale of cannon fire dissolved the parapet wall and turned it to clouds of driving dust and gravel.
The suddenness of it all was what shocked Claudia most. One moment there was the stillness and tranquil darkness of dawn and the next the glare and cacophony of battle, the sky lit by the brilliance of leaping flame and glittering floods of tracers, her ears pounded by bursting mortars, shells and grenades and the blasts of machine gun fire.
it took long moments to adjust her eyes to the intensity of light orient herself to the swift kaleidoscope of the battle. Job and to had pointed out to her the point on the perimeter of the laager through which Sean would lead the assault, and she searched it anxiously. The tiny figures of running men on the exposed slope of the hill were lit by the flames of burning avgas, which cast dark spiderlike shadows that scampered ahead of each man. There were so many of them, little black ants scurrying about, and with a jolt of them fall and lie very still in the of horror she watched some sound.
confusion of movement and light and 4: 'Where is Sean?' she whispered anxiously. 'Can you see him?'
411N the left, at the edge of the smoke,' Job told her, and she an ahead of him like a picked him out by the tiny figure that r hunting dog.
'I see him and Matatu.'
Just in front of the pair the earth seemed suddenly to bloom with dust and flame, and they were gone.
'Oh, God. No!' she cried aloud, but as the dust blew aside on the morning breeze she saw the two of them running On, tracer bullets flickering about them like hellish fireflies.
'Please, please protect him,' she breathed, and lost sight of him as he reached the first emplacement.
'Where is he?' She found she had seized Job's arm and was it wildly. 'Where is he, can you see him?'
shaking Suddenly Sean was there again, and even at that distance he appeared a heroic figure, balancing easily on the sandbagged parapet in the ruddy glow of the flames. She cried aloud with relief.
Then she saw him cower, and from out of the very earth, only of a Hind a short distance ahead of him, the monstrous shape gunship reared into the air and swung its monstrous head toward him, lowering like a charging bull. She heard the roar of its cannon, and leaping fountains of dust and flying earth obscured Sean's distant figure as cannon shell raked across the hillside.
'Job!' she screamed. 'They have killed him!' She reached out for him again, but Job shook off her hand.
He was down on one knee, the launch tube of the Stinger across his right shoulder, his face in the reflected firelight fixed in a mask of concentration as he stared into the sight screen.
'Quickly!' Claudia whispered. 'Shoot quickly!'
The missile leaped from its long tube, and hot air and stinging Particles Of dust and dead grass were blown back into Claudia's face as the rocket motor ignited. She slitted her eyes and held her breath as she watched it dart away on its tail of smoke and flame, leaving a trail of dazzling smoke behind it as it flew toward the crest of the hill where the Hind hovered against the dark sky.
She saw the slight kick in its trajectory as the missile changed to the ultraviolet seeker and lifted its nose fractionally, aiming no longer at the armored exhaust ports but at the open mouth of the turbo intakes, just below the humped gearbox of the rotor.
She thought she saw the missile fly squarely into the intake, but the resulting explosion was deceptively mild, contained within the shell of titanium armor plate so that none of its fury was dissipated. The Hind reeled wildly, throwing its nose high, falling backward so its tail rotor caught the rocky hillside and flipped it over sideways. It tumbled and bounced down the slope, rolling end over end, flames billowing from the throat of the air intake, its huge main rotor thrashing the earth and tearing itself to pieces, fragments hurtling into the night sky.
Claudia sought desperately for Sean and gasped as she recognized him through the dust and smoke, leaping back onto the parapet and then plunging on up the hillside with Matatu close behind him.
'Reload!' Job snapped at her. With a guilty start she reached for the spare missile tube beside her and helped him clip it into the launcher.
The moment the Stinger was reloaded she glanced back at the laager. Sean was gone, but three more of the Hind gunships were airborne, soaring across the dawn, backlit by the flames. They were firing their cannon, some of them seeking targets within the laager, where the attackers were in desperate hand-to-hand combat with the Frehmo garrison, others flailing the dark forest beyond the perimeter with their gales of tracer, trying to extinguish the hail of missiles that flew at them from out of the darkness.
Another Hind 'was hit and fell on its back, bursting into violent flame as it crashed into the rocky crest of the hill, and then another staggered in flight and curved down, mortally wounded, to hit the treetops and cartwheel through them to the earth.
As fast as they fell, others rose from their hidden emplacements with cannons blazing, sweeping down on the attackers. Job leaped to his feet as a gunship tried to break away, climbing steeply over their heads. He arched his back, pointing the missile almost vertically upward, like a gun taking on a high-driven pheasant.
The Hind was a thousand feet up and climbing away. It seemed to be safely beyond the Stinger's effective range, presenting a difficult angle and impossible trajectory, but the missile darted up, overhauling it effortlessly, and the great machine seemed to wince and tremble to the shot, for a moment standing stationary in the air, before it fell back with its damaged turbos screaming in mortal agony and dived into the valley, hitting in a storm of breaking trunks.
branches and torn tree 'Reload.' Job did not even watch the Hind's death agony, and Claudia leaped to help him fit another missile tube to the launcher.
She tapped his shoulder as she finished.
'Go!' she said.
Another Hind came out of the forest directly in front of them.
The Russian pilot was flying so low he seemed to be earthbound.
He was dodging and ducking the huge machine behind the scattered trees, weaving like a boxer, the downdraft of the rotor flatw feet below the Hind's belly.
tening the tall elephant grass only a fe Job turned to face the oncoming machine, standing out in the open and lit by the flames. He braced himself, Picking up the image of the Hind in the sight screen.
The Hind seemed to steady itself for an instant, and the blast of like a hurricane wind.
its Gatling cannon swept around them her feet by the force Standing beside Job, Claudia was blown off with the supersonic shock of passing of it, and her ears buzzed cannon shells.
e wind from Job was thrown on top of her, his weight driving th her lungs, but they had fallen between two round boulders that deflected the rest of the volley of cannon fire. The Hind passed over them, only feet above where they lay, and the blast of its rotors slashed at them, whipping Claudia's hair into her face so it stung her eyes like a scourge.
sing tiger shark. Claudia was Then the Hind slid away like a crui suffocating with Job's weight on top of her and half-blinded by to free herself and was dust and her own hair. She struggled wet and that hot liquid was suddenly aware that her hands were spilling over her and soaking her shirt 'Job!' she blurted. 'Get up! Get off me!' Only when he neither replied nor moved but lay on her with a heavy, loose weight did she realize that the wetness that was dousing her was Job's blood. That knowledge gave her wild strength, and she rolled his body aside and dragged herself out from under him She crawled to her knees and looked down at him. A cannon shell had hit him high in the upper body, and the damage was though he had been savaged and mauled by horrific. It looked as some ferocious
