“Think the vehicles are hidden all right?” panted Carrie, at his heels.
“Best we can do,” he replied.
But as soon as he neared the fringe of the trees, holding up a hand to warn the others not to go too far, Jim realized that the pair of Chinook CH-47Ms had other fish to fry.
It was a bizarre scene, like something out of an old Vietnam vid from seventy years ago.
The far side of the dam, where another road rolled out of sight to the north, a straggling line of tracked personnel carriers had stopped. Men were pouring out of them, and they could hear the faint crackle of small-arms fire. A small group were struggling to set up a grenade-launching tripod.
“Missile,” said Nanci, throwing herself flat in the dirt at Jim’s elbow.
“What?”
“Erecting a 155 mm launcher. Probably got a laser-guided system for an antitank missile. And they’re going to use it against the Hunters’ Chinooks.” She paused, shading her eyes with her hand. “Although, it looks to me like they’ve only got the one missile. Could be an old Silverhead. They’d better make it count or they’ll get themselves minced sitting out there.”
“Where’s whirlybirds?” panted Sly, sitting down with his back against the stump of an old ponderosa, wheezing like an old man who’d just completed a marathon.
The choppers had momentarily vanished, though everyone could still hear the sound of their rotors, over beyond the far end of the swollen lake.
“They’ll come back on a strafing run and leave a lot of blood in the dirt there,” said Henderson McGill, holding little Sukie in his arms, wrapped in a plaid blanket.
“THEY’VE TURNED, General.”
Zelig was watching through glasses. “I see them. They will open up as they pass by. We have to hit the first one with the Silverhead. Won’t get a second chance.”
“Ready, sir!” yelled the freckled sergeant in charge of the launching system for the missile.
“READY!” shouted Margaret Tabor in the second of the big choppers.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It was possibly the most important single battle ever fought on the soil of the American continent.
Lexington, Chancellorsville, Bunker Hill, the Alamo, First Bull Run, Fort Sumter… the list of major engagements is endless. But the skirmish between two helicopters and half a dozen armored personnel carriers in a nameless valley in Oregon in late December of 2040 was perhaps more crucial than any of them. For it was to determine the balance of right and power over the reemerging land for the rest of time.
It lasted less than an hour from its beginning to its unexpected ending.
And the opening exchange was all over in less than sixty seconds.
THE LEADING CHINOOK, loaded with fuel and supplies, began firing as soon as it swooped over the crest of the ridge, with the lake, dam and valley extending in front of it.
General Zelig fought against the overwhelming desire to go out there and press the firing trigger on the Silverhead missile himself, but he knew well enough that his operatives were better trained and more skillful than he was.
“Now,” he whispered as machine-gun bullets dug a furrow along the side of the blacktop, a stray round pinging off the roof of the APC.
There was the shout of command, followed instantly by the whooshing roar of the rocket being fired.
The Chinook was less than two hundred feet away, making the range the equivalent of pressing the muzzle of a revolver against someone’s forehead and squeezing the trigger.
Margaret Tabor, in the second helicopter close behind, saw the burst of flame but didn’t even have time to draw a breath to give a warning.
The charge of 68.75 pounds of explosive detonated on impact with the underbelly of the Chinook, ripping it apart in a burst of shock and flame. The stock of spare gasoline ignited almost immediately, and the machine disintegrated in a huge fireball.
“Ace on the fucking line,” yelled Henderson McGill, lying with the rest of the watchers on the fringe of the dead forest.
“Poor people,” said Sly, covering his eyes from the sight of the tumbling, burning wreckage.
In her desperate anxiety to wipe Zelig and his small force off the planet, Margaret Tabor had made two fundamental and crucial tactical errors.