Blade sighed. General Golovin's habit of personally conducting key investigations had finally stretched his luck to the breaking point. It was unfortunate that he couldn't have been taken alive, but Blade could hardly blame Golovin for taking the same way out he himself might have used in similar circumstances.
In any case, Golovin was dead. A raid that cost the Red Flames their most brilliant counterespionage man could hardly be called unsuccessful, regardless of what else happened.
Quite a lot had happened while Blade was otherwise occupied, as he discovered when he was able to go back to commanding the strike force. While mopping up operations continued inside the radio station, Blade got on the command radio and took reports from each unit under his command.
The Demolition Group was in position. Three of the four tunnels from the dragon caves were blown, the fourth was rigged, and the main charges were ready for lowering into place at the dam. They'd had a little bit of trouble with two dozen dragons already on the surface ready for shipment, but that was over now.
The Blocking Group was also in position, and very bored. The two bridges were blown and there was no sign of an enemy within miles. Did they have permission to come up to join the fighting?
Permission denied. As much as Blade appreciated their kind of fighting spirit, he wasn't going to leave his back door unguarded. The Blocking Force would go on blocking.
It was harder to get a clear picture of the Battle Force. They'd struck hard and done their work thoroughly. In the process they'd become scattered all over the base, and were only just now regrouping to mop up and start collecting prisoners and wrecking facilities.
Casualties appeared to be light. One company had lost the better part of a platoon to an undetected gun position. Blade's own reserve had lost twelve men. Otherwise the casualty reports only trickled in by twos and threes.
Argus One came back on the air, reporting the overrunning of the mortar position. A few minutes later, Blade felt the ground start to shake at intervals as the Battle Group's demolition teams went to work. The thud of explosions came through the smoke, followed by the rumble and crashing of collapsing buildings and the crackle and roar of flames.
A captured enemy truck rolled past, two of the raiders in the cab and two more sitting in back. The rest of the back was filled with limp bodies in civilian clothes. The first load of prisoners was on its way back to the transports.
By now the smoke from the mortar barrage and the crashed helicopters was drifting away. Two demolitions men came up to Blade and asked for permission to set charges on the radio masts. Blade gave the permission, scrambled up on top of the radio truck, and sat on the roof.
Now the attack planes came roaring in low overhead, ten of them. Blade tuned in on their frequency, listening to their cheerful comments on the shambles unfolding below. After a minute he got their report.
Their job was also done. Two planes had gone down over the target, but the only first-class enemy airfield within five hundred miles would be out of action for at least a couple of days. They'd shot down five enemy fighters over the field, and on the way here they'd added four light-attack planes, a transport, and two helicopters to the score.
Blade gave them a «Well Done,» but he couldn't give them any targets. The dragon base was disintegrating so rapidly under the hands of the strike force that there was nothing left for the pilots to do except fly air cover until the job was done.
Blade signaled to the driver of the radio truck, and it headed for the pilots' planned drop zone near the canyon of the dragon caves. Rounding up the pilots was something Blade wanted to supervise himself. Everything else seemed to be well under control.
The biggest explosion yet shook the ground so violently that the driver nearly lost control of the truck. For a moment Blade wondered if the Demolition Group had blown the dam prematurely. Then he saw flames and smoke mounting toward the sky from the fuel dump. The smoke rose to join the vast cloud that already hung over the base, casting its shadow on the ruins. The only thing that seemed to be intact anywhere on the landscape was one of the breeding vats. As Blade watched, smoke puffed up from its base and it split apart. Most of it fell to the ground and the rest stuck up like a solitary jagged tooth.
The roar of assault transports lifting off sounded overhead. Blade looked up to see the transports of the Demolition Group pass, shifting as he watched from vertical to horizontal flight. That meant the charges on the dam were set and fused. Blade checked the left breast pocket of his battledress. On a slip of paper, there was the code to detonate the fuses by radio command if the timers didn't work.
As Blade's truck rolled into the drop area the pilots started abandoning their planes. One by one they swung low and slow over the area, pulled up, and ejected. The ejection seats kicked them up and clear, then their white and yellow parachutes streamed out behind them and they began drifting down all over the area. The cyclists roared off to pick them up. Blade sensed an urgency in their speed, a desire to get the job done and follow the Demolition Group out of here!
Blade's truck pulled up at the very edge of the canyon. As he climbed out, the transport of the Blocking Group roared overhead, its wings swinging back to the high speed position. Its engines flamed brightly as the pilot cut in the afterburners in his eagerness to get away.
One by one the pilotless attack planes plunged to the ground and exploded. Blade saw one strike the edge of the canyon, bounce, and tumble down onto the dragons far below. Blade watched as the monsters charged about in mounting panic, trampling and attacking one another, battering themselves against the rock, trying vainly to climb the canyon walls.
The pilot of the last plane nearly followed it into the canyon. Blade saw him drifting down toward the edge, shouted at him, but knew that his words were lost in the roars of the dragons.
At the last moment the pilot spilled air from his parachute. It collapsed, dropping him twenty feet to the ground. He landed no more than inches from the edge. Blade and two other men sprinted to grab the pilot before his chute dragged him into the canyon. They caught him with no more than seconds to spare. As Blade knelt, with both hands clamped on one of the pilot's boots, he saw the lake behind the dam heave up into a monstrous white dome of water.
All three charges must have gone off together. The damn did not crumble, it was blown away by the combined force of the explosions and the water they drove before them. A section of dam three hundred feet wide and two hundred feet high was gone before the shock or sound of the explosion reached Blade. Then the roar of the water followed, and after that the roar of the dragons.
Blade forced himself to watch as the flood thundered down the canyon, a wall of water a hundred feet high. It tossed live dragons, dead dragons, boulders the size of a house like chips of wood. It swept along at a mile a minute, throwing up a curtain of spray so thick it seemed the canyon was filling with smoke. By the time the flood passed below where Blade was standing, the spray rose halfway to the canyon's edge. It was thick enough to blot out the view of what was happening below, but the roar of the water was not loud enough to drown out the dying roars of the dragons.
If the dragons had been natural creatures, however dangerous, Blade could have taken no pleasure in such wholesale slaughter. But their origins were unnatural, so there was nothing he could regret in the way they'd died.
He led the others away from the canyon's rim until the roar of the water began to fade. Then he stopped and said to everyone within earshot: