第38节

ssion as

their Skyhawks sat poised on the catapult ramps. Oblivious of the

danger from the hidden Mute marksmen, Steve and fellow-graduate Fazetti

leapt up onto the flight deck and aimed repeated volleys of fire up

over the river banks while Murray and three of his ground-crew freed

the two pilots from their safety harnesses and lifted them out of the

cockpit pods. The seventeen-year-old Webber had been killed

outright.

Caulfield was not so fortunate. A bolt had entered the side of his

helmet just behind his left eye, driving the barbed point through his

head and out through the matching spot on the other side.

When the crew-chief lifted Caulfield's visor to check if he was still

alive, Steve glimpsed the full horror of what had happened. The shock

wave generated by the bolt's impact had blown his eyeballs out of their

sockets. While the battle raged around them, Caulfield sat, silent and

uncomprehending, his grotesquely dislocated face streaked with blood.

It was only when the ground-crewmen attempted to move him that he began

to kick and scream.

Steve helped hold Caulfield down while the crew-chief tied his arms and

legs together then lowered him over the side to Gus White and the three

medics sharing his duckhole. 'Get him to the surgeon-captain,' shouted

Murray. He returned dragging Webber's limp body. 'And put this one in

a bag."

Undeterred, Ryan climbed into the cockpit of Webber's Skyhawk and

quickly satisfied himself that the controls were undamaged. Naylor,

the remaining wingman in the first wave tried to restart Caulfield's

plane but failed. One of the ground-crew found a vital lead that had

been severed by a second bolt.

Naylor jumped out and helped pull the disabled aircraft off the

catapult. 'It's good to know they miss now and then!" he said, with a

quick, edgy laugh.

Crouched on the deck to Ryan's right, Murray signalled

to him to wind the motor up to full power then swept his arm forward

as the catapult was released. The Skyhawk soared into the air, climbed

steeply to the right, then rolled on its back at about two hundred feet

and went into a corkscrew dive. The sickening crunch of Ryan hitting

the ground was obliterated by a muffled boom as his load of napalm

exploded. Steve and the other people on the flight-deck winced with

horror but watched with morbid fascination as a searing burst of

brilliant orange fire ballooned outwards from the point of impact then

rolled in on itself and lifted to become a mushroom cloud of black

smoke, leaving the mangled carcass of the Skyhawk silhouetted in the

middle of a circle of blazing grass.

Steve made an effort to swallow but his throat was dry. He was not

squeamish at the sight of blood, or ruptured flesh, and was confident

of his ability to kill when the time came but he could still not get

used to the frightening rapidity with which someone like Ryan, a

living, thinking human being, who had been there talking to him only

moments before, could be transformed into an unrecognisable lump of

charred meat. Jodi, Booker, Yates, Webber and now Ryan. He recalled,

with a flash of anger, his sister's words back at Roosevelt Field

'don't start telling me how dangerous it is to be out there fighting

Mutes'. Roz should be here now, prizing what was left of Ryan out of

the smouldering, twisted cage of struts up there on the river bank.

She would realise that Trail-Blazer expeditions were not the

'cake-walk' she had claimed them to be.

Hartmann, the wagon master, who had seen the slaughter on the flight

deck and Ryan's death dive on the battery of screens in the saddle

quickly decided that to have three wingmen taken out of the air in

under five minutes was an unacceptable loss-rate. He put himself on

the visicomm system and faced-up with Baxter. 'Put the air strike

on"hold" and call everybody in off the flight deck. We're going to try

and break up this attack another way. Stand by to launch two and

two.

You're to stay on the ground. With the kind of luck we've had so far

today I'm not prepared to risk the whole of my air force."

Baxter, the F.O.O acknowledged the revised orders and halted the lift

taking Naylor's Skyhawk up to the flight-deck.

Naylor, who was already seated in the cockpit, steeled for his turn at

Russian Roulette on the catapult, unstrapped himself and jumped out