The young man gave him a wicked grin and fired the machine gun. Behind them, armored troop carriers raced to keep up. Farther back, scores of infantry ran doggedly after them.
Shell fire crashed into the wide meadow between them and the woods. The Russians had spotted them and were trying to find the range with their artillery.
“Don’t drive in a straight line!” Malagni shouted. “They’ll shaft us for sure.”
“Yes, sir!” Tobias shot back. He turned the car as sharply to the right as he could without rolling it. They headed directly toward the Russian line on the highway.
A shell whistled past and exploded behind them. Tobias veered left and another shell destroyed tundra where they would have been if they hadn’t turned.
“Some son of a bitch has plans for us,” Malagni bellowed.
The machine gunner kept up a steady fire that laced the tree line despite the violence of Tobias’ driving.
Malagni smiled, felt his heart hammering and his senses keen as razors.
He heard the one that got them. The shriek sounded far too loud to miss. Malagni didn’t hear the explosion, but the front of the car flew apart as the shell detonated directly in its path.
The shattered car body flew back in a lazy spin, throwing the men out to be buffeted by the sledgehammer concussion of the round. Malagni landed on the stump of his right arm. Pain vomited through him and he screamed. He rolled over and came to his feet, involuntary tears streaming down his face.
Tobias, still clutching the steering wheel in his hands, hair scorched by the explosion, sat on the ground peering about owlishly. “Wot the hell was that?”
The decapitated body of the machine gunner lay kicking in the sphagnum moss and early forget-me-nots, blood jetting from the mangled neck. An armored troop carrier roared up and men leaped out, picked up Tobias, and tossed him in the back.
“Can we offer you a ride, Colonel?” the sergeant driver asked.
Malagni jumped on the running board. “Let’s get them.”
The troop carrier bounced toward the enemy. The Russians had dug in and fired at them with good effect. Bullets splanged off the roof and hood of the carrier.
“Okay, Sarge,” Malagni said casually. “Let’s let them off here.”
Another enemy shell screamed over but landed in the tree line, taking out at least five Russians.
“Damned sporting of them,” Malagni shouted, grinning.
The artillery fire ceased. Now it was an infantry fight. Dena troopers poured out of the carriers and spread out, returning fire and digging in.
Malagni started to speak into his microphone before he realized the headset wasn’t hooked to a radio any longer, so he jerked it off his head and threw it over his shoulder. He turned toward the double-timing troops, who had closed to two hundred meters, waved his arm over his head and pointed to the trees where the Russian line thinned to nothing.
A dozen rounds stitched across the ground toward him and he took cover behind a mossy rock. One round hit the rock, spraying tiny chips across the back of Malagni’s neck. He thought it felt like mosquito bites. Big mosquito bites.
His troops slowed, spreading out in a wavery hundred meter line, with little or no cover, and taking too many casualties.
“Enough!” he bellowed, jumping to his feet. “Let’s take them once and for all!” Malagni fired out the clip in the machine pistol at the Russians and threw the weapon over his shoulder.
He slipped the axe free, swung it over his head, and charged the enemy. Shouts echoed up and down the Dena line as his men rose and charged with him.
80
First Lieutenant Gerald Yamato found himself in the twin-thirty crossfire from three tanks. He felt
Then his controls went mushy and the solid stream of smoke from his engine compartment burst into bright flame washing back over his cockpit. Another minute in this situation would kill him. He immediately ejected the canopy and, after jerking his seat restraints free, threw himself into the smoky wake of his doomed P-61, which screamed out of control down into the awesome canyon a thousand feet below the battle.
Lieutenant Yamato wrenched his chute around so he could see as much of the battle as possible. While he watched, one of the Eureka fighters suddenly flamed, trailed smoke and exploded.
“Looked like Christenson’s ship,” he said to himself, feeling his heart lurch. Mike was the squadron mascot, a classic brilliant, self-doomed fuckoff.
A tree drifted past and he realized he had better pay mind to his own predicament; for him the fight with the Russians was over. An explosion from below pulled his attention to the bottom of the valley. His fighter had impacted at the edge of a river.
Someone had claimed it was the Delta River.
The wind pushed him farther down the huge canyon. The artist in him took a quick moment to appreciate the majestic beauty of the valley. The miles-long ridge on the far side rippled in shades of reds, pinks, greens, and even light purples, like a Technicolor layer cake cut and toppled on its side.
Then the pragmatic flier took over and he worked his chute in order to come down near the river, rather than hang up in the middle of the forest bordering both sides of the obviously swift-moving water. Even before the ground rushed up and grabbed him, he wondered what equipment he had and would it be enough?
His landing was textbook; take the shock with his feet together and collapse in a rolling tumble. Unlike the field back in the Napa Valley, this one was covered with boulders and rocks the size of his head.
He landed on a small boulder and his feet slid off to the right. He threw his arm out and instantly jerked it to his side again—he couldn’t risk breaking it. His shoulder took the majority of the impact and immediately went numb. Jerry threw out his hands and stopped himself.
The parachute settled on the rocky floodplain, began to fill from the constant breeze moving alongside the water. He pushed himself up and jerked the shroud lines, collapsing the silk. His shoulder hurt like hell but he swiftly pulled the lines into a pile at his feet.
Just as his hands touched the silk canopy, he heard a massive explosion from above. He looked up the incredible slope. At first he saw nothing but smoke pouring down from the road on the canyon rim. Then he saw awful movement.
At least nine Russian tanks avalanched down the steep wall, rotating in deadly descent, thunderously smashing flat the rocks and trees before crashing into each other or bouncing farther out into the canyon. Huge boulders and entire swaths of trees boiled in a descending dust-shrouded dance of death.
Behind the maelstrom tumbled a boulder larger than any tank, gouging out sixty-meter-wide swaths of mountainside before spinning out into the air again, following the doomed Russian war machines into the abyss.
Lieutenant Jerry Yamato felt sorry for the poor bastards in the tanks, even though they were all probably dead at this point; that was a hell of a way to go.
Some of the tanks didn’t explode when they finally hit bottom. Some did. And Jerry wasn’t sure how many tanks the boulder hit when it landed. Everything ended about a quarter mile from him.
With the river twisting along the bottom of the valley, and the trees bordering the floodplain, the end result was completely obscured. A huge cloud of dust swirled into the breeze along the river and quickly dissipated.
A Eureka fighter suddenly roared down through the valley and screamed over him as he wildly waved his arms. Then it was gone. All of the beautiful, darting silver planes disappeared and the valley went silent, as if