Bolan did not fire on Bruner. He first needed to take out Teckert, who stood closest to Hohlstrom and posed the most immediate threat to the fallen Mossad agent.

Bolan's 9mm round frothed apart most of merc Teckert's skull out the chopper's door into the Sahara night racing by directly behind him, followed by what remained of his corpse.

In the same flick of time, Hohlstrom had rolled onto his side and brought the AK tracking upward toward Bruner. A deadly chatter from Hohlstrom's grip spit a burst of shredders that lifted Bruner to the bulkhead of the helicopter and held him there for a moment, his torso bursting apart. Bruner slumped down to the deck. The bulkhead behind where his body had been pinned was riddled, marred with flesh and blood and smoking shreds of clothing.

Hohlstrom pushed himself to his knees, then wiped away the blood that still oozed down into his eyes from his forehead wound. The Mossad man was injured, but holding on. Staying hard.

Bolan swung his focus to the pilot of the chopper.

The pilot was responding to the action. He had punched into the tac net and was shouting into a hand-held mike something that Bolan could not hear. Now the merc pilot was swinging around in his cockpit, tracking toward Bolan with an old-fashioned army issue Colt .45.

Bolan's Browning again penciled death. The pilot pitched over, his near-lifeless body palpitating to final departure on the floor.

Bolan leaped forward and seated himself in the cockpit. He took control of the Huey, glancing out the Plexiglas for a reading of position on the other two choppers.

Quivers of a past life echoed in from his subconscious: soldiering in the hellgrounds of Vietnam those many years ago, learning all he could about everything involved with surviving in a hostile jungle combat zone; observing things like how to pilot the Hueys, those ever-present big birds of Nam.

The Huey with Doyle was pulling away south and there was nothing Bolan could do to halt it.

The other gunship was responding to the dead pilot's radioed SOS.

The heavily armed chopper was banking around for a kill shot. Bolan reacted quickly, pulling the cyclic control stick hard to his left.

"Hang on!" he shouted over his shoulder at Hohlstrom.

As he spoke, their aircraft was already lurching and dipping in an evasive maneuver.

The other Huey opened fire. Its turret-mounted miniguns rattled off a twin streak of 5.56mm armor-piercing rounds.

A direct raking of the fuselage of Bolan's copter was avoided by his fast evasive response. But the other gunship scored a hit.

Bolan felt the cyclic control stick vibrate wildly in his fist. That was the first warning.

Abrupt silence replaced the screaming whine of the Huey's transmission above and behind Bolan. All engine gauges on the flight-control instrument panel plummeted to zero.

Bolan's chopper had sustained an engine hit. The engine was dead. Bolan had only seconds to react.

To his left side in the cockpit was a collective pitch-control lever that controlled the pitch of the rotors. He rammed it down. With the pitch of the blades flattened, even the whistling outside died away.

Bolan was aiming for autorotation of the blades from the copter's downward momentum.

It was an old trick that worked... sometimes.

It was the only trick he had right now.

The silent Huey went into a descending glide, the air from its downward speed rushing up through the blades, keeping them spinning.

The other gunship opened fire with its machine guns, sending a twin stream of tracer bullets that arced only inches from the plexiglas near Bolan.

All of Bolan's attention centered on the flight controls and life-or-death gauge readings of the aircraft he was attempting to land.

His Huey was sailing in at a fast, steady, dangerous descent.

He glanced at the tachometer. As the speed of his chopper's drop increased, the autorotation of the blades registered as climbing rpm. The needle edged back into the safe zone.

Bolan's copter angled downward at about seventy knots. The trickiest part was yet to come.

Bolan closely monitored those rpm. The collective pitch-control lever to his left and the cyclic-control stick to his right both gouged deep furrows into Bolan's palms.

The mother ship of the mission, carrying Kennedy's official number two, Doyle, plus the cargo and the knowledge of Eva Aguilar's whereabouts, was long gone. Gunship number two was probably aiming to land on the desert floor close below, waiting for Bolan and Hohlstrom to crash — and waiting to kill them if they survived.

Bolan flicked on his landing lights, illuminating the first traces of rocky sand dunes beneath him. Once Bolan had fixed his position, he punched off the lights.

At some fifty feet from the ground, still descending with gut-wrenching speed, Mack Bolan ripped back on the cyclic lever.

The Huey nosed sharply upward until the helicopter almost stood on its tail. The rate of dive was arrested as if a tug wire had been yanked, bringing Bolan's tipped machine to a momentary midair stop.

This was the critical point of a dead-engine landing.

Truth time.

At the precise moment that the Huey had air-braked with its nose at a new upward forty-five degree angle, the warrior in the cockpit shoved the cyclic forward again.

The chopper's rounded nose dropped into a level position. Bolan was fiercely aware of the blood pounding in his ears from the pitching rate of descent followed by the sudden halt.

The Huey was now only fifteen, twenty feet above the desert floor. Hanging there. The rotors still going.

Bolan eased in on the collective once more, very gently.

The ground came up toward the ship like a hurtling wall. The helicopter hit zero with a crunch, a stunning stop made mad by all the framework and the components and the carried objects continuing on down as if headed for the center of the earth.

It was a stubbornness of physics that led to a grinding, screeching crash as a full load of metal-toting gravity collided with the surface of that earth.

Carried objects included Bolan and Hohlstrom, who were pounded into their crash positions as if by a giant fist. Bolan was winded, his perceptions temporarily shattered, his side bruised by the controls as the wrecked helicopter tilted forward brutally, suddenly burying its undernose in a sand dune.

The smell of gasoline filled the cockpit. Actual vapor stung Bolan's nose.

"Out of here! Out, out!" he called, as if automatically overcoming shock and pain with roaring movement.

Hohlstrom was lifting himself once more from the helicopter's floor. The impact of the landing had knocked him down and damn near out again, then the nose-tilt had sent him sprawling.

Like a man skilled at being big, he had moved through the ordeal with a relaxed rolling motion that had spared him major hurt or rupture. Any puncturing was reserved for the gas line.

Now Hohlstrom was up and leaping from the gas-reeking wreck. But Bolan had already moved clear, was indeed returning for Hohlstrom, his mouth forming further commands to get the hell out.

The vapor seemed to sizzle before it suddenly burst into a mighty whump, blasting a fireball of broiling red and orange out across the crash site, spreading a wave of scorching acrid hell that gobbled at the back of the Mossad agent.

Hohlstrom nose-dived toward Bolan, the heat mushrooming over him. He was safe — and his face was half-buried in gritty sand.

Mack Bolan, his features ablaze from the glow that illuminated the environment like sunrise in a gray dawn sky, reached Hohlstrom and hauled him to his feet.

"Here comes whatever's next," he said, glancing up. The two men were near a ridge that would hide them from what was soon to be a landing zone. And a kill zone.