It was fifty feet long. The Russians themselves called it "Sturmovich," the humpback. It was a deformed monster: aberrant and ungainly, the green and brown splotches of tropical camouflage giving it the appearance of disease and leprous decay. The bulging double canopies of armored glass looked like malevolent eyes, and so fierce was their gaze that Sean instinctively flattened himself in the grass and flung a protective arm over Claudia's back.
Below the gross body of the gunship hung an assembly of rocket s, and as they stared at it in awe the machine hovered and PM rotated on its own axis, lowered its blunt unlovely nose, and fired a spread of rockets. They launched with fiery sibilance on plumes of white smoke, streaking across the river and bursting on the ant's nests of sandbagged bunkers in fountains of flame and smoke and dust. The noise was deafening, and the shrill whine of the gunship's rotors was like an awl screwing into their eardrums.
Claudia covered both her ears and sobbed. "Oh God! Oh God!"
The Hind revolved slowly, seeking fresh targets and again they cowered away from it. It moved away from them, hunting along the bank of the river. The Gatling cannon in its remote-controlled turret in the nose fired blasts of solid metal into the forest, destroying all in its path.
"Let's go"" Sean shouted above the uproar, dragging Claudia to her feet. Job and Dedan ran ahead of them, and the earth plowed by the gunship's cannons was soft and spongy under their feet.
As they passed the dead men, Job stooped without breaking his run and snatched up one of the undamaged RPG launchers. At the next stride he stooped again and grabbed a fiberglass backpack that contained three of the finned projectiles for the RPG, then went bounding away, on toward the riverbank. With her injured knee Claudia could not match that pace, and even with Sean pulling her along they fell almost a hundred yards behind.
Job and Dedan reached the riverbank. It was steep and rocky, fractured cliffs of water-polished black stone. A gallery of tall riverine trees spread their branches out over the swiftly flowing apple-green waters.
Job looked back at them anxiously, for they were still out in the open. His face contorted as he screamed a warning, dropped the fiberglass pack at his feet, and swung the short squat barrel of the RPG up to his shoulder, pointing it at the sky above Sean's head.
Sean did not look up; he knew there was no time for that. He had not isolated the shrieking rotors of the second incoming Hind from the deafening uproar caused by the first machine, but now the din was escalating to the point of pain.
Running beside them was a narrow don ga eroded by the storm waters of the rainy season but now dry and sheer-sided. Sean swept Claudia off her feet and jumped with her in his arms. The earthen gulley was six feet deep, and they hit the bottom with an impact that clashed Sean's teeth together just as the lip of the gulley dissolved under a jet of cannon fire. The earth on which they lay shuddered like a live thing beneath them, as though they were insects being shaken from the flanks of a gigantic horse. Earth, ripped from the lip of the gulley by the sheets of cannon fire, fell
4it on them in clouds, heavy clods raining on their backs, knocking the breath out of them, dust choking them, burying them alive.
Claudia screamed and tried to fight herself out from under the layer of dust and dry earth, but Sean held her down.
ll "Lie still," he hissed at her. "Don't move, you dilly bird." The Hind swiveled and cruised back, now directly over the gulley, searching for them, the gunner traversing the thick stack of multi barrels of the Gatling cannon in its remote turret.
Sean turned his head slightly, looking up from the corner of one eye. His vision was obscured by dust, but as it cleared he saw the i great splotched nose of the ffind hanging in the air only fifty feet above them. The gunner must have picked out their white skins, which made them targets of preference. Only the thin layer of fresh earth protected them from his scrutiny through the gunsight of his cannon.
""Hit him, Job," Sean pleaded aloud. "Iffit the bastard."
on the ciff above the river, job dropped on one knee The RPG-7 was one of his favorite weapons. The huge gunship was hovering over the gulley only fifty yards away.
He aimed twelve inches below the edge of the pilot's canopy.
The RpG was highly inaccurate, and even at point-blank range he gave himself latitude should the missile By off track. He held the cross wire steady for a beat of his pumping heart, then Pressed the trigger. The exhaust of white smoke blew back over his shoulder and the rocket streaked away, flying fair and true, to strike only inches higher than he -had aimed on the run where the armored tai use Se glass canopy joined the camouflaged me f la The rocket burst with a force that would blow the engine block out of a Mack truck or burst the boiler of a railway locomotive.
For an instant the front of the Hind was obliterated by flame and smoke, and Job whooped triumphantly, jumping to his feet, expecting the hideous monster to crash out of the Sky in a sheet of its own smoke and fire:4 Instead the huge helicopter jumped higher, as though the pilot had flinched at the rocket burst close beside him, but when the smoke blew away, Job realized with disbelief that the fuselage was unscathed. There was only a sooty black smear on the painted metal to mark the spot where the rocket had struck.
him As he stared, the ugly nose of the Hind swiveled toward and the many-eyed muzzles of the cannon sought him out. Job hurled the RPG launcher away and jumped out from the cliff top, dropping twenty feet to hit the water, just as the cannon tore the great branches from the tree under which he had stood. Cannon fire chewed through the Mink as cleanly as a lumberjack's cross ad saw. The entire tree leaned outward, then toppled down the cliff and hit the surface of the river in a cloud of spray.
The Hind pulled away, lifting and banking, cruising on down the riverbank. Unharmed by the rocket hit and as deadly as before, it sought its next target.
Sean crawled to his knees coughing and gasping. "Are you all right?" he croaked, but for "a moment Claudia could not answer him. Her eyes were blinded with sand, and her tears cut wet runners through the dust that caked her cheeks.