A distant rattle of a machine gun shook the jungle, the animals going quiet, the birds screaming loudly and rustling the trees as they launched for the sky.
Frowning deeply, Krysty turned in a circle. “Gaia save us, there are Hummers everywhere.”
“Trying to flush us out,” Jak said, awkwardly shifting his stance on the cratches.
Reaching high, Ryan grabbed a branch and pulled himself off the ground. “Wait for my signal to follow,” he said from the blackness above. “Don’t do anything until I come back. If I get aced, head for the mountains. We passed a cave there you can use to hide in until things cool down.”
“Get going and find that plane,” J.B. growled irritably, balancing the shotgun in his grip.
Digging in his boots, Ryan started shimmying up the tree and soon disappeared from sight in the thick foliage. A few minutes later, a brass cartridge fell to the ground, bouncing off the branches until it hit the ground. Dean scooped it up and saw the cartridge was intact, and not a spent round ejected from his father’s blaster.
“Live,” he reported. “Dad found it.”
“Get moving,” J.B. said, and started up the tree himself, moving slower than Ryan because of the Uzi on his back. The little branches kept sticking into the weapon and slowing him.
Grabbing a vine, the Armorer tried climbing that instead of the tree and made much faster progress. The vine was thicker than a gren, and the wide leaves provided good bracing for his boots. As the vine ended, he shimmied along the branch until reaching the trunk. He stabbed a knife into the wood, drawing himself up as he kicked footholds in the rough bark with his boots.
The higher he climbed, the cooler it got and the brighter the sunlight. Soon J.B. emerged from the canopy of leaves to find himself blinking in direct sunlight. Ryan stood nearby with a boot resting in the fork of two branches, looking through the curtain of vines.
“There she is,” he said, indicating the direction with his chin.
Pulling himself onto the stout branch, J.B. could only marvel at the titanic machine sprawled in the treetops before them. It was gigantic.
More than a hundred feet long, the incredible aircraft supported two huge engines with six propellers on each wing. Vines and creepers covered the plane, only the glass of the cockpit and the tail rudder clearly visible amid the flowering creepers. It was a wonder Dean had spotted it from a mile away.
“That’s a Hercules,” Ryan said, swaying to the wind. It was a lot stronger up there and carried a strong taste of salt from the nearby ocean. “Saw a picture of one in a redoubt, pinned to the wall like a girlie poster.”
“Yeah, I know,” J.B. replied. “I spent a month living in a crashed wreck once. Good planes.”
Carefully, Ryan glanced downward. “Any chance the sec men could see us up here?”
“No way in hell,” Krysty replied, crawling into view. Then the woman paused at the sight of the huge plane. “That flew?”
“Like an angel,” Mildred said, pulling herself along a vine and stepping onto a branch. “The Hercules C-130.”
In a short while, the rest of the companions arrived, Jak and Doc last, the elderly man assisting the wounded teenager to a fork in the trunk. The Cajun gave the old man a nod in thanks and settled his aching back against the trunk of the tree.
“No way this thing flew,” Dean stated flatly. “No way.”
“Big mother,” Jak agreed, massaging his throbbing ankle.
Careful of his footing, Ryan walked along the branch and experimentally rested a boot on the tip of a wing. It didn’t move, so he put on more and more weight until he was standing fully on the leafy metal. Nothing moved. He chanced a jump, and the leaves shook a little, but the plane remained firmly in place. There was no way anybody could have moved such a colossal machine into the treetops to make a hidden ville. The aircraft had to have crashed here during a storm, and the branches grew around the trapped plane over the decades, trapping it forever.