“Watch it!” Valentina exclaimed. A black rectangle had suddenly appeared in the Halo’s fuselage, the jettisoned door fluttering away toward the pack ice below. “He’s opening his gun ports!”

Sparks of muzzle flame danced inside the open doorway, and gun smoke streaked down the flank of the heavy lifter. Randi countered, flaring the Long Ranger back. Climbing and sideslipping, she put her smaller, nimbler machine above and behind the shield of the larger helicopter’s blade arc, positioning so that Kretek’s gunners could not fire on them without damaging their own rotors.

Below them, the Halo weaved sluggishly, like an elephant waving its tusks at a prowling lion, the containment vessel swinging, pendulumlike, at the end of its tether.

“Wouldn’t it be lovely if they developed a bad case of butterfingers and just dropped the damn thing?” Valentina commented.

“A nice thought, but it’s something we can’t count on,” Smith replied. “Randi, what are the odds of our shooting out one of their engines?”

The blonde shook her head. “Not good at all! The Halo is built to Russian mil spec. It’s a flying tank, designed to absorb a lot of battle damage.”

“There’s got to be some point of vulnerability!” Smith insisted.

Randi frowned in thought. “Maybe the Jesus nut, the main rotor hub. If you can cut a push-pull rod or fracture a blade hinge, that might do it.”

“Val, it’s your rifle. What do you think?”

The historian looked dubiously at her old Winchester. “I don’t know. The.220 Swift is an excellent man killer but a stinkin’ antimateriel round. There’s too much velocity and not enough penetration.”

“Can you do it?” Smith insisted.

“I can but try. No promises, though. Randi, bring us in, close as you can and as steady as you can.”

She lay down on the deck in the prone firing position. Twisting the sling of the model 70 around her forearm, she aimed out of the side hatch, nestling in behind the sights.

Stacked almost on top of each other, the Long Ranger and the Halo thundered through the arctic sky, a crow mercilessly harrying a vulture. In the Halo’s cockpit, the deck below Kretek’s feet swayed ominously, the arcing swings of the containment vessel at the end of the cable wrenching at the heavy lifter.

“They’re firing at us!” the arms dealer bellowed into the ear of the Halo’s pilot. “Do something!” With the escape hatches kicked open, the interior of the big helicopter was a welter of wind roar and engine shriek.

“I can’t maneuver with a sling load!” the pilot yelled back. “The only way we can evade is by cutting loose!”

An automatic pistol appeared in Kretek’s hand. “Try it and I’ll kill you.”

It was no idle threat, as the Halo’s pilot was well aware. But the threat presented by that other rotor-winged gadfly was not idle, either. There was the tap and screech of a bullet strike on the upper fuselage.

“Climb, you bastard!” Kretek snapped. “Climb above them so we can shoot back!”

Gritting his teeth, the pilot twisted his throttle grip to maximum war power, pushing the Tumanski gas turbines to their limits and sending the tachometers and temperature gauges swinging up and into their red zones.

Randi Russell made the Long Ranger dance, maintaining her position and distance from the lumbering Halo as if connected to it by an invisible boom, keeping behind the invisible shield of the larger helicopter’s rotor plain, denying the hostile gunners a target.

Valentina Metrace worked her own skills to their limit as well. Lips curled into a snarl of concentration, she worked the model 70 like an automaton, tracking on target, jacking the bolt to eject the empties, and firing on the split-seconds the sight picture became right. Three times she paused to feed fresh shells into the rifle, but as the third magazine emptied, she lowered the weapon, shaking her head.

“It’s no good, Jon,” she yelled. “I’m connecting, but the damn bullets just explode when they hit. Too much vel. It’s not going to work.”

“What else can we try?”

She looked up at him from the deck. “We try for the pilots. There’s the same velocity-and-penetration problem, though. I’ll have to first blow out the windscreen and then fire through the hole to get at the men.”

“If that’s what we’ve got, we go with it.”

“One additional problem.” She shoved her hand into her sweatshirt pocket. When she removed and opened it, three slender, sharp-nosed cartridges gleamed in the palm of her glove. “That’s the lot. Then the cow’s dry.”

“Like I said, if that’s what we’ve got. Randi, set us up.”

She had been listening to the exchange. “I’ll have to drop below the rotor arc to give you a line of fire into the cockpit. They’ll get to shoot back.”

“I’ll say yet again, if that’s what we’ve got.”

“Where are they?” the Halo’s pilot demanded, eyeing his sideview mirrors. “Where’d the cocksuckers go?”

“I do not know.” His copilot twisted in his seat and peered out the side bubble. “They dropped behind us.”

“What is it?” Kretek demanded from over the pilot’s shoulder.

“I don’t know,” the pilot replied shortly. “They’re back on our six. They’re trying something.”

Then he felt the vibration through his controls as a second blast of rotor wash interfered with his own. A shadow tore over the cockpit as the floats of the Long Ranger flashed past, mere feet overhead, in a shallow accelerating dive. Pulling a couple of hundred feet ahead, the smaller helicopter skidded in midair, presenting its open side hatch to the Halo.

“What the f-”

The left side of the cockpit windscreen exploded in a hailstorm of pebbled glass. The copilot screamed incoherently, clawing at his shredded face. Then his scream was abruptly cut off as the second murderously precise rifle slug caught the Byelorussian in the throat, almost decapitating him.

A combat flier’s instincts took over, and the pilot locked his controls over. The nose of the Halo came around, sluggishly but quick enough to put the third bullet past his shoulder instead of into his head.

The Halo continued its wild turnaway, shuddering on the verge of a rotor stall. The pilot could hear the door gunner blazing wildly back at their attacker as he fought with the cyclic and collective, trying not to further stress the Halo’s critically overloaded airframe. His hand went to the T-grip handle of the emergency sling release.

“No!” The muzzle of Kretek’s automatic jammed into the pilot’s throat. Glaring like a wild boar at bay, the arms merchant wedged himself between the cockpit seats, his left arm a bloody ruin from the hypervelocity bullet that had missed the pilot. “No!”

Grimly Randi held her course until she heard Val’s rifle crack out its last shot. The Halo was turning on them like a ship of the line presenting its broadside, automatic weapons fire lashing from its side hatches. Submachine gun slugs dotted the flank of the Long Ranger. With her windscreen starring with bullet hits, Randi kicked up onto a rotor tip and dove under the firestreams.

In the cargo bay, Smith locked one arm around a seat brace and the other around Valentina as the radical evasion threatened to hurl them both out of the plunging aircraft. For a fragment of a second they could see the anthrax reservoir lashing wildly at the end of its sling cable, threatening to sweep down on them like Thor’s hammer. Then they were past and diving clear, beneath and behind the Halo.

Smith stuck his head out into the slipstream, looking after the fate of the stricken heavy lifter, hoping, praying to see the sling cable breaking or the big helicopter spinning down out of the sky. For a few heartening moments the Halo did seem to stagger on the verge of departing control. Then it stabilized and resumed its remorseless drone to the southeast.

The outer islands of the archipelago lay very close now.