‘Take it slow and easy now, soldier!’ Ryderbeit breathed: ‘That boy’s not goin’ to make any more noise.’
Murray had the headlamps dipped, steering out into the one-way path between a double row of huts. They had each studied the plan of the airfield so well they knew every track, every turning by heart.
‘Are you loaded?’ Ryderbeit said at last.
‘Load me,’ said Murray, and felt his M16 jerked sideways, the confident touch as Ryderbeit snapped the clip under the plastic muzzle, the light weight of the strap against his shoulders. He wondered — despite the film industry — how long it really took a strong man in anger to break down an ordinary-size door wedged by a chair.
He had reached the end of the ATCO III compound and now turned towards the huge aerial transport lanes lying a thousand yards ahead in almost total darkness, under a sky ripped by criss-cross streaks of light — the whole night black and heavy with the fluctuating boom and scream of invisible machinery.
They reached the beginning of a long zig-zagging wall of sandbagged fighter plane parking bays, with the folding wing tips of the Phantoms and Thunderchiefs jutting over the top like sharks’ fins. No one spoke again until Murray suddenly drew into a dark embrasure about a hundred yards from the end of the wall, stopped and switched off the headlamps. Just ahead were two long black sedans, unmarked, non-military, with no lights.
‘Look like Treasury boys,’ Ryderbeit muttered, glancing at his watch. ‘Ten forty-three. Two minutes to go. That bitch o’ yours had better be on time with Virgil’s button,’ he added, ‘or we’re going to be right in the shit!’
‘We’re pretty deep in it already,’ said Murray.
A couple of flares burst high ahead along the perimeter, lighting them all up like sitting toy soldiers. They were now nearly half a mile from the hut where Conquest had died, and Murray was just wondering which alert would go out first, when he saw in his mirror a pair of blazing headlamps and a flashing red beacon heading straight at them from behind, along the edge of the sandbagged wall.
Ryderbeit and No-Entry slipped their guns on to semiautomatic. ‘Wait for it!’ said Ryderbeit, as a camouflaged jeep identical to their own came screeching up behind them and both doors snapped open.
‘You men with Major Millbright’s outfit?’ a voice called. Two officers in fatigues and soft G.I. caps had stepped out, unarmed.
No-Entry Jones turned in his seat, beginning to stand up and salute. ‘Correct, sir.’
‘Then get the hell out o’ here!’ the officer cried: ‘You know this whole area’s off limits till twenty-three-fifteen hundred hours?’
‘You givin’ us orders?’ Ryderbeit said, in a very passable Mid-West accent.
‘I’m ordering you to get your arses out o’ here!’ the man bawled back, but even as he spoke there came two brilliant flashes about a hundred yards to their right, followed by a double ear-cracking explosion, and the two men flung themselves half sideways into the shelter of the jeep, as two more flashes burst about a mile away and the first officer was yelling, ‘Get your heads down!’ But the words drifted emptily into a high whooping howl — the panic-stricken howl of the Red Alert siren bouncing off more than a dozen echo-chambers in every corner of the giant Tân Sơn Nhất airfield. The officer tried to shout above the sound, but another rocket swished down and burst with a shuddering crack behind the sandbagged wall, this time followed by a boom and the billowing glare of exploding high-octane fuel.
Ryderbeit yelled: ‘Get goin’!’ and Murray let the clutch out, the jeep jerking into the dark, its lights still switched off, heading towards the two dead sedans. But just as they drew abreast of them, two red bars of tail-lights came on and both cars started forward together. ‘Take ’em, soldier — on the right!’
Murray swung the wheel over and passed both cars — long black Fleetwoods with smoked windows so that it was impossible to see how many men were inside. He had his foot flat on the floor, but the jeep lacked the power of the two big cars which were accelerating fast.
Ryderbeit and No-Entry sat twisted round in their seats, and a moment later their M16’s flared simultaneously — two bursts ripping diagonally across both windshields, but without any apparent effect. Ryderbeit raised his gun and fired more carefully this time, the muzzle jumping in his hand as he lined up the tyres of the first car, while Jones blazed away at the headlamps of the second.
But the cars kept coming on, all headlamps intact, drawing rapidly closer. Ryderbeit swore: ‘Bullet-proof glass — self-sealing tyres!’ He laid down his carbine and now reached inside his tunic pockets, bringing out a grenade in each hand. The two cars were almost level with each other now, perhaps twenty yards behind, beginning to draw apart to cut the jeep off on either side, when Ryderbeit pulled the pin of the first grenade with his teeth and flung it, in a smooth lob, directly in the path of the car on their left.
The grenade hit the concrete almost exactly in front of the headlamps and exploded a second later, well under the long engine. There was a flash and the front wheels rose and toppled, the whole car going into a drunken slewing motion, while Ryderbeit leapt round, pulled the next pin and aimed the second grenade low and fast, like a deadly
