In a lurching sideslip, the Deathbird flung itself away from the bank, and its blades pinwheeled across the gully, chopping into and embedding in the soil. The main rotor assembly continued to spin with broken, jagged stems. The craft cannonaded port first against the gully floor.
A roaring ball of red-yellow flame mushroomed up from the ruptured fuel tank. Kane recoiled as the wall of hot air, pushed forward by the thundering explosion, slapped his face.
“Oops,” he said mildly.
The Deathbird piloted by Pollard veered away, banking sharply, climbing above the cloud of black smoke and the column of fire. His enraged voice crashed over Kane’s comm link “Another pair of Mags for you! You traitor! They’re the last ones! You hear? The last ones !”
The Deathbird dropped straight down, catching itself only a few feet above the gully, as if its plummet had been checked by an invisible string. It plunged forward in a roaring rush. A rocket burst from the port stub wing and soared, flaming, directly toward the Sandcat. It skidded past its right side and exploded a dozen yards ahead. Metal and rock fragments, smashed into the vehicle’s frontal armor, and smaller pieces put new cracks in the windshield. A lump of stone bounced off the back of Kane’s helmet, jarring him off his feet. He fell clumsily into his seat. Terrified, Brigid asked him if he was all right. He waved her off with a gesture and shouted to Domi, “Evasive!”
She swung the wheel from left to right, swerving back and forth. The heavy machine responded sluggishly, wallowing laboriously. He knew it was already too late for such maneuvers to be effective.
The Sandcat shook with a bone-numbing shock as a missile detonated almost directly beneath it. The rear end jumped some three feet, and slewed around in a one-eighty at thirty miles per hour, all direction and control gone. The right back fender smashed broadside against the gully bank.
Kane had braced himself so the sudden jolting stop didn’t fling him into the instrument panel or through the windshield. Before his stunned eardrums recovered from the concussion, he heard the jack-hammer clanging of treads shearing away from the rollers, the entire left track thrashing in a long flapping strip. Sparks showered and metal screamed as the roller rims slashed deep furrows into the rocky ground.
The air inside the wag grew stifling hot as the incendiary compounds of the warhead interacted with the armor. Smoke and the cloying smell of metal turning molten filled the cramped interior. Grant coughed rackingly, pushing Brigid ahead of him. “We’ve got to bail!”
The driver’s door was jammed shut inside its warped frame. Kane shouldered the passenger door open and dragged Domi across the seats, then helped Grant and Brigid to climb out. From the undercarriage and from every seam of the Sandcat boiled a mixture of white, gray and black smoke. Blobs of burning napalm jelly clung to the armor, sending up spirals of flame.
Their backs against the gully wall, the four people crept away from the smoke-spewing Sandcat, all of them craning their necks, scanning the sky. The black chopper was nowhere in sight.
Her voice raspy from inhaling smoke, Brigid asked, “How far are we from this canyon?”
Domi jerked a thumb up over her head. “Up and over that way. We’re there already.”
“So is Pollard,” Kane muttered.
“Maybe he thinks we’re dead,” Grant added, not sounding as though he believed it.
“Salvo ordered him to make sure we were flash-blasted,” Kane replied. “So he’ll make sure.”
“Hell, at least we’ll be right on course when he burns us down,” Grant said. Though he wasn’t limping, his right leg was stiff. “Let’s get on with this.”
Under the cover of the pall of smoke, scaling the side of the gully was fairly easy, the work of only a couple of minutes. But Kane noticed fresh blood seeping through the bandage around Grant’s thigh when he climbed the slope.
Sheer walls rose to nearly a hundred feet on either side, grooved with deep horizontal lines, here and there forming ledges where the softer layers of strata had eroded away.
The canyon floor was less than two hundred feet wide in some places, and it wended off to the right. Boulders and outcroppings were strewed all around, except for an unnaturally flat clearing a score of yards ahead of them. From it protruded the split-open stump of the Vulcan-Phalanx gun housing.