chief’s eyes showed a special hardness that couldn’t be faked, and the gauntness of premature aging that no one could hide, which proved he’d been in combat in this war. In comparison, the other passengers looked too fresh faced, their eyes in an indefinable way much too naive for them to be combat veterans.
He felt heavy vibrations through the deck and through his backside. The muffled noises getting through his hearing protection grew louder and deeper in pitch. Outside the windows the ground receded, then the Seahawk put its nose down so the main rotors could dig into the air and grab more speed. The helo turned west, inland.
Immediately, two other helos closed in on the Seahawk, one from port and one from starboard. Jeffrey knew these were the shuttle’s armed escorts. They were Apache Longbows, two-man army combat choppers. Jeffrey saw the clusters of air-to-ground rockets in big pods on both sides of each Apache. He watched the chin-mounted Gatling gun each Apache also bore, as the 30-millimeter barrels swiveled around, slaved to sights on the helmets worn by the gunners.
These escorted shuttle flights were necessary. The Axis had assassination squads operating inside the U.S., targeting military personnel with high-level expertise or information. They’d almost certainly been pre-positioned and pre-equipped secretly, during the long-term conspiracy that had led to the war. Some of the teams were former Russian special forces, Spetznaz, now in the pay of the Germans and willing to die to accomplish their tasks. The schedule of the helo shuttles varied randomly, and their flight paths varied as well, to stay unpredictable.
Jeffrey forced himself to relax. He was well protected now.
The passenger compartment smelled of lubricants, plastic, and warm electronics; there was no solid bulkhead between the passengers and where the pilot and copilot sat, and Jeffrey could see the backs of their heads if he craned his neck to the right. The compartment was stuffy from the aircraft having sat in the sun before, so the crew chief’s assistant slid open a couple of windows. A pleasant, slightly humid breeze came in.
Built-up urban and then suburban areas petered out, and the land below was more forested, the road net thinner. The helos descended to just above the treetops without slowing, and the tips of southern pines tore by in an exhilarating blur. The Apaches both wore camouflage paint with blotches of green and black and brown, so they became harder to see against the foliage. Jeffrey’s helo, with its plain gray paint job, would blend in much better against the sky for anyone looking at it from the ground. He assumed this tactic was intentional.
He folded his arms across his chest, lulled into a semi-doze by the Seahawk’s steady, reassuring rotor and transmission vibrations and engine roar. He still felt pangs of regret for finally ending his on-again, off-again relationship with Ilse Reebeck, a Boer freedom fighter who’d joined him on several classified missions. Once, Ilse had broken up with Jeffrey, saying they came from different cultures on separate continents, and with his seeming death wish in battle, Jeffrey could never be Ilse’s choice for a lifelong mate, someone to father her children. But then she’d wanted to get back together again, and Jeffrey had been more than willing. The passion that resumed, whenever they were on leave together, quickly became as stormy and edgy as ever — and eventually Jeffrey had simply had enough. He realized that the two of them were in an emotional co-dependency, that the same things that drew them together also triggered deep-seated resentments.
Jeffrey was startled when the helo suddenly banked sharply into a very tight right turn. The power-train vibrations grew harder and rougher as the helo’s deck tilted steeply to starboard. The g-force pressed Jeffrey into his seat; outside, the world slid down away from view and he could see only the sky. Jeffrey’s gut tightened. He grabbed wildly for armrests that weren’t there and felt afraid and didn’t know what to do with his hands. The others in the compartment also showed worry… except for the crew chief and his assistant, who were amused. The Seahawk leveled off and everything returned to normal.
Jeffrey realized that this was simply a course change. The crew chief pointed out the starboard side of the aircraft; Jeffrey turned his head as far as he could. Through a window, he barely made out a city on the horizon. He concluded that the helos had passed well south of Richmond, and now were flying northeast, toward Washington. Below Jeffrey, the trees sometimes gave way to open, rolling fields, many recently plowed and planted — with food in short supply nationwide and the transportation infrastructure overstrained, every spare acre of available soil was farmed.
Sitting back again, and looking out the port side, Jeffrey noticed hints of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance, paralleling his flight path. Both army Apache gunships flew near the Seahawk in a loose formation.
Jeffrey began to think about what sort of meeting awaited him at the Pentagon. He assumed he hadn’t been told anything for security reasons. He took for granted that the meeting was vital, or he wouldn’t have been torn away from supervising the work on his ship. He guessed it had something to do with another combat mission. Jeffrey dearly hoped this was so. He ached to get back in the thick of it, to defend American interests and give the Axis one more bloody nose — or maybe in this round knock their teeth out.
Through his earcups, and above the noises of flight, Jeffrey noticed a strange new sound. He lifted one earcup, and even over the deafening turbine engines mounted not far above his head, he heard a nerve-jarring siren noise in the cockpit. The crew chief and the assistant, whose flight helmets — unlike the passengers’—were equipped with intercoms, seemed agitated. They began to stare very nervously out both sides of the aircraft.
The Seahawk banked hard left and almost stood on its side, buffeting Jeffrey in his harness. The helo leveled off but kept turning and stood on its other side, wrenching his neck so he almost got whiplash. Both engines were straining now, and the siren noise continued. Jeffrey was afraid they’d had a control failure and would crash. Then Jeffrey heard thumps, and felt bangs.
The Seahawk turned hard left, again. It fought for altitude. Through the window Jeffrey saw multiple suns, hot and almost blinding. Then he saw something much worse.
Two black dots approached the Seahawk, fast, riding bright-red rocket plumes that left billowing trails of brownish smoke. Jeffrey understood now: Those little suns were infrared decoy flares. The Seahawk was under attack from shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. There were Axis assassination teams at work somewhere on the ground.
Jeffrey felt more thumps and bangs. His heart was pounding and his hands shook badly, even though his mind was crystal clear. The crew chief and his assistant gestured for everyone to grab the straps of their shoulder harnesses — to steady themselves and avoid arms flailing everywhere — as the pilot and copilot pulled more violent evasive maneuvers. Jeffrey did what he was told, and it helped, but not a lot.
He hated feeling so defenseless. Any second a missile could strike the Seahawk, or its proximity fuse could detonate. The helo’s tail could be blown off or its fuel tanks be hit and explode or shrapnel could shred the unarmored cockpit. Shattered and burning, pilotless, the Seahawk would plunge into the earth.
There was a sharp blast somewhere close, but the Seahawk kept flying. It made another hard turn, and Jeffrey saw that one of the missiles had been fooled by the decoy flares. A ragged cloud of black smoke mingled with the heat flares floating on small parachutes.
The other missile was rushing off into the distance, with a perfectly straight red beam from nearby seeming to shove it away, like a rod of something solid. Jeffrey realized this was an antimissile laser, designed to confuse the heat-seeker head and homing software of the inbound enemy weapon. What Jeffrey perceived as a magic rod was the nonlethal laser beam lighting up fine dust and traces of smoke in the air. The laser came from one of the Apaches.
The Seahawk jinked, and he caught a glimpse of an Apache unloading a rippling salvo of rockets at the spot where a missile plume still lingered, rising from its launch point on the ground. The rockets streaked like meteors and pulverized an area of trees in a series of flashes and spouts of dirt. But Jeffrey saw no secondary explosions — he was sure the attackers would have more missiles, and they’d relocate themselves quickly after making that initial telltale launch. They probably even had all-terrain trucks, disguised with freshly cut greenery so they’d be mobile and harder to see.
The other Apache emitted a different-looking solid red rod from its chin. This, Jeffrey knew, was a burst of cannon tracer rounds from its multibarreled Gatling gun. The thing could fire three thousand rounds per minute. The gunner and pilot were after something. The Gatling gun fired again, and this time there was a brilliant, heaving eruption on the ground. Flames and debris shot high into the air.
