'God in heaven, he's going to go under them all,' Rip said in awe.
Blood was soaking the leg of Jean-Paul's jumpsuit. He was in severe pain. He was flying without a plan because he could think of no way to end this nightmare. No way to destroy the saucer that he knew was behind him, hunting him, no way to kill that Charley Pine.
The sensation of speed this close to the water was sublime. He avoided a ship and two smaller vessels, weaving slightly, and saw the bridges ahead. Unconsciously he asked the computer to back off on the power, and it did. The saucer was down to three hundred knots now.
In seconds the spans shot over his head.
He had to turn hard to stay over the river, and the Gs made his leg bleed more. He screamed in agony.
There was no relief from the pain.
Desperate to do something, he commanded a pull-up and turn to the left. The saucer responded to his thoughts.
Now Charley saw the enemy saucer rising and turn-ing, cutting across midtown. This was her chance, her opening.
Yet she refused to take it. There was no way she was going to force Lalouette to crash in Manhattan. She racked her ship into a turn to preserve her angular and height advantage.
The French pilot soared over the buildings in a long, lazy turn that carried him across the island and out over the Hudson River, where he steadied out going south.
He was in too much pain to think, to look around for his opponent. He held on to his bleeding leg with his one good hand, trying to stanch the blood flow. To no avail.
When he saw the Statue of Liberty approaching his nose he turned again, descending.
'Now what?' Rip asked the gods.
The other saucer was in a descending turn. It looked for a moment as if it might go into the water. Then the nose came up and it skimmed the surface heading north toward the Battery.
Lalouette was again down on the deck. He shot over Battery Park at two or three hundred feet and actually went between two buildings immediately north of the park's small splash of green. Charley Pine pushed her nose down, intending to get immediately behind the other ship. Yet she was afraid to go as low as the French pilot.
He was frightened, she realized. He must be injured.
'Jesus,' Rip said as the saucer ahead flashed between buildings.
A jog on Broadway, then straight north up the Avenue of the Americas toward Central Park. She was only a few hundred yards behind, but the larger saucer was lower, below the plane of the antimatter weapon. She couldn't bring herself to dive down to his level. The buildings whipped past like fence posts.
After the saucers fled the vicinity of Andrews, television producers were left without a main event. Talking heads took over as the producers ran replays of the footage they did have.
When it became probable that the saucers weren't going to return to Andrews, television stations in cities across the nation launched their traffic helicopters in the hope that the saucers would come their way. One of the networks now put on the air video of the two saucers racing along, one behind the other, between the buildings of New York.
In the presidential lounge off the main hangar floor at Andrews, the president and his advisers were called to the television by the president's granddaughter. 'There they are,' Amanda squealed, pointing at the set against the wall.
After watching for a few seconds, the president tightened his grip on the arm of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. 'Where are those fighters?'
'I don't know, sir,' the general said bitterly. As if a Pentagon four-star knew the exact location of airborne airplanes. If they were airborne. The alert had gone out about fifteen minutes ago, plenty of time for the alert fighters to scramble. But without guidance from their ground control station, the general knew, the pilots would have no idea where to go to intercept their targets. The general also knew that now was not the time to explain the facts of life to the president, but he did pry the commander-in-chiefs fingers off his coat sleeve as he concentrated on the television picture.
Bleeding profusely, in shock and screaming with pain, the here and now — this moment — was all that mat-
tered to Jean-Paul Lalouette. At some level he knew he would never live to see France again. He tried to ask the computer to fly him into a building, to end it right now, but he couldn't make himself do it.
He got a glimpse of Central Park ahead, rapidly approaching, just a blur of green.
Charley too saw the park coming up and knew that this was her chance. Perhaps her only chance. She would try to drop the enemy saucer in the park. She would fly right over him, using the wash from her saucer to force his into the ground. She lowered the nose of her bird and dove, closing the distance.
As the southeast edge of the park flashed under them, Lalouette began a gentle turn to the left. The distance between the two ships was less than a hundred feet. Charley turned harder left and added more power as the enemy ship began moving under her nose.
At precisely that instant fate took a hand. A moment of clarity broke through the fog of pain that held Jean- Paul Lalouette in its grip. He didn't want to crash in the city, kill innocent people.
He reacted automatically.
The beast of rocket exhaust and the wash from the saucer ahead flipped Charley's saucer ninety degrees onto its side as the enemy saucer did a maximum-G pull into the vertical.
She was on a knife's edge, a hundred feet above the tree-
tops of Central Park, doing about three hundred knots— with no visible means of support. Her saucer was flying a parabola into the ground.
Horrified, she slammed the stick sideways to right the ship and pulled the antigravity collective up into her armpit. The saucer responded, but not quite fast enough. It hit the top of a tree, bounced back into the air and settled into another. Clouds of leaves exploded behind her as the saucer once again caromed into the air.
The lucky network that had captured images of the saucers had three helicopters over Manhattan: one over lower downtown, one over Greenwich Village, and one over midtown. Each broadcast its video in turn as the saucers raced north. The last helo got the saucers in Central Park, the lead saucer pulling up abruptly and the trailing saucer gyrating wildly and smacking into the treetops. As the clouds of leaves exploded skyward, the network lost the video feed from the helicopter.
Back at Andrews, the president had his nose a foot from the screen when it went blank. Forgetting the presence of his granddaughter and the two dozen other people crowded around trying to see, he swore a mighty oath and smashed his fist down on top of the recalcitrant set. The picture stayed blank.
The Roswell saucer rose vertically on a plume of fire. A severely wounded Jean-Paul Lalouette thought of France, so the computer began to slowly tilt the saucer toward the east, toward the North Atlantic.
Lalouette had lost a lot of blood, and the Gs of accelera-
tion quickened the blood flow from the damaged area. His blood pressure dropped precipitiously. In seconds he lost consciousness. Twenty seconds after that his heart stopped.
The saucer continued upward, tilting slowly to the east, accelerating…
The exhaust plume of the Roswell saucer was impossible to miss. Charley Pine stayed on the juice, trying to catch Lalouette. Unfortunately he was perhaps twenty seconds ahead.
The combined roar of the two saucers was the loudest noise ever heard in New York. It rattled windows all over the five boroughs and shook the buildings of Manhattan. Elevators jammed. In offices and apartments, restaurants and bars all over the island, floors and walls trembled; dust rose from gypsum drywall and settled from the ceiling light fixtures. People dove under furniture or ran for doorways as the pictures on their televisions finally
