Valentine's Exile (5 page)

The grass between the northwest-southeast parallel runways flanking the field bulged, then dimpled, then collapsed, sending a cloud of dirt to join the smoke still coating the field.

“Between the runways,” Ahn-Kha shouted from his position at a supporting column. And unnecessarily, as Valentine locked eyes on the spot and brought up his binoculars.

A corkscrew prow the size of one of the old
Thunderbolt
's lifeboats emerged into daylight. Striped blacks and browns on a pebbly, organic surface spun hypnotically as it rotated. Brown flesh behind the snout pulsed, ripples like circular waves traveling backward to the hidden portion of the thing. It rolled like a show diver performing a forward twist and nosed back into the earth. Overgrown prairie plants flew as the giant worm tilled and plunged back into the soil.

“What the devil?” the Arkansan said, watching the creature dig, still spinning clockwise as it reburied itself.

Tiny planes whipped over the inverted
U
of exposed flesh.

“Tunnels, Colonel, they've tunneled to the airfield,” Valentine said into the field phone. He consulted the map of the airfield and its surroundings, pinned to the carpeted wall of the observation van. “We need fire support to grid N-7, repeat N-7.”

The tunneling worm's other end finally appeared, another shell-like counterpoint to the prow. Valentine marked an orifice at the very tip this time, though whether it was for eating or excreting he couldn't say.

The two identical warcraft, turbofans bulging above their broad wings, banked in from the west, aiming directly at the parking garages.

Valentine dropped the field glasses and the phone handpiece. Something about the crosslike silhouettes of the aircraft suggested approaching doom.

“This won't be good,” Lewis said.

“Out! Out! Out!” Valentine shouted.

Ahn-Kha was already at the van door, perhaps ready to bodily pull the men from the observation post, but the three jumped from the van and ran for the central stairway.

They didn't quite make it.

Valentine heard faint whooshing noises from behind, over the Doppler-effect sound of the quickly growing engine noise. The men flung themselves down, recognizing the rockets for what they were.

The planes had aimed for the floor beneath theirs, as it turned out. Though loud, the only damage the explosions did was to their eardrums. A stray rocket struck their floor of the garage over at the other wing of the structure.

The van caught some of the blast from below. Their carpeted cubbyhole tipped on its side, blown off its blocks.

“Let's see if the phone's still working,” Valentine said.

“What if they come around for another pass?” the Arkansan asked, teeth chattering.

“They've got to be out of fireworks by now,” Lewis said.

“You alright, old horse?” Valentine asked Ahn-Kha, who was inspecting his puddler.

One business envelope-sized pointed ear drooped. “Yes. The sight may be out of alignment. I dropped it in my haste.”

Back at the edge of the garage, in the shadow of a supporting column, Valentine gulped and met Ahn-Kha's eyes before cautiously peeping over the edge of the parking lot wall and surveying the field. A beating sound had replaced the higher-pitched airplane engines.

Helicopters!

Gradually Valentine made out shapes through the obscuring smoke of still-burning jellied gasoline and the more recent rocket blasts. A great, sand-colored behemoth with twin rotors forward, and a smaller stabilizing fan aft thundered out of the west. Smaller helicopters flanked her, like drones looking to mate with some great queen bee.

One of the little stunt planes flew in, dropping a canister near the holes. It sputtered to life on impact and threw a streamer of red smoke into the sky.

“Field phone's still good, Major,” Lewis said, extracting the canvas-covered pack from the van.

“Spot for the artillery, if it's available,” Valentine said, trying to give intelligible orders while racking his brain for what he knew about helicopter function. “Target that cherry bomb by the holes. And send Base Defense Southwest to Colonel Meadows.”

“Base defense southwest, yes, sir,” Lewis repeated.

Another plane roared by, seemingly inches from the garage, with a suddenness that momentarily stopped Valentine's heart.

“I do not like these airplanes,” Ahn-Kha said.

Valentine watched the smaller helicopters shoot off more rockets, but these just sent up more thick clouds of smoke, putting a dark gray wall between the observation point and the holes.

“If we can't see them . . . set up the puddler. Lewis, any word on the artillery?”

“Sounds like they've been hit too, sir,” Lewis said, taking his hand away from the ear not held to the phone.

The twin-rotored helicopter blew just enough smoke away with its massive blades so they could get a quick look at it as it landed by the hole.

“That's your target,” Valentine said. “See the smaller rotor, spinning at the end of the tail? Aim for the center of that.”

Smoke obscured the quick glance, but Valentine had seen something emerge from the hole dug by the worm, a turtlelike shape.

“Our mortars, anything, get it put down on that hole!”
They can shoot a hundred shells a day into the Dallas works, but they can't drop a few on Love Field
.

“Nothing to shoot at, my David,” Ahn-Kha said, ears twitching this way and that, telegraphing his frustration. The Grog had his gun resting on his shoulder and its unique bipod. The gun muzzle was suspended by heavyweight fishing line from the bipod arching over it rather than resting atop the supports, allowing for tiny alterations and changes in direction, typical of creative Grog engineering, right down to the leather collar that kept the line from melting. The black-painted line acted as a fore sight when Ahn-Kha wasn't shooting through the telescopic sight.

Valentine felt impotent. “Tell Meadows it's a breakout,” he said to Lewis. “I think the Kurians are trying to run for it with the helicopters.”

“Why didn't they just land on a street in Dallas?” Lewis asked.

“We've got high-angle artillery there,” Valentine said.

“Sir,” the Arkansan shouted as the smoke clouds cleared. Some kind of bay doors had opened at the rear of the massive helicopter, which rested on thick-tired multiple wheels. The turtlelike thing, which looked to Valentine like a greenish propane storage tank crawling across the runway without benefit of wheels, tracks, or legs, had turned for the big chopper.

Ahn-Kha's gun coughed and Valentine's nose registered cordite. Ahn-Kha didn't bother to watch the shot. Instead he drew another highlighter-sized bullet from his bandolier and reloaded the gun.

But the smoke was back.

Valentine could just make out the helicopter through the thinning smoke. Explosions sounded from back toward the terminal, as another piece of the Razor military machine was blown up.

Ahn-Kha must have been able to see the rear rotor for a second—he fired again. Valentine marked the strange tanklike thing entering the rear of the helicopter . . . it was like watching a film of a hen laying an egg run backward.

“Where's the fuckin' support?” the Arkansan asked, voicing Valentine's thoughts exactly.

Valentine heard engines on the ground. He looked to the south, where a few of the Razors' strange conglomeration of transport and patrol vehicles—including two prowlers—were barreling past the statue of Flight at the edge of the airport buildings.

“Holy shit, the cavalry!” the Arkansan shouted.

Valentine recognized the salt-and-pepper hair of the man at the minigun in the lead prowler. Captain William Post. It was hard not to join the private in screaming his head off.

The aircraft spotted the vehicles too. A twin-engine airplane swooped in, firing cannon at the column. Valentine saw one big-tired transport turn and plow into the garage.

Ahn-Kha fired again, and the helicopter wobbled as it left the ground, rear doors still closing. The helicopter lurched sideways—perhaps Ahn-Kha had damaged the rear rotor after all.

The pilot managed to get the helicopter, which was skittering sideways across the field like a balky horse, righted.

Light caught Valentine's eyes from above and he looked up to see muzzle flash from a big four-engine aircraft above. Some kind of gun fired on the approaching vehicles.

But the Razors had guns of their own—and someone trained them on the staggering helicopter. Machine guns and small cannon opened up, sending pieces of fuselage flying. Black smoke blossomed from the craft's engine crown, instantly dispersed by the powerful rotors.

Ahn-Kha shot again.

The Razor vehicles had to pay for their impertinent charge. The military turbofan planes swooped in—Valentine grimly noted a desert camouflage pattern atop the craft— and fired from some kind of cannon that created a muzzle flash as big as the blunt nose of the aircraft, planting blossoms of fiery destruction among the Razor attackers.

Post's armored car turned over as it died. Valentine couldn't imagine what the wreck had done to his friend.

Like sacrificing a knight to take the enemy queen, even as the prowlers exploded the double-rotored helicopter tipped sideways, sending its six blades spinning into the smoke-filled sky as it crashed. The helicopter's crew jumped out with credible speed, and Ahn-Kha swiveled his cannon.

“No. I want prisoners,” Valentine said.

One of the smaller helicopters swooped in and landed, even as tracer fire began to appear from the positions at the base of the garage, where gun slits had been clawed through the concrete weeks ago.

Ahn-Kha shifted his aim and began to send 20mm-cannon shells into the tail rotor of the rescue helicopter.

The concrete to the left of Ahn-Kha exploded into powdery dust. “Down!”
Was that my voice?
Valentine wondered as he threw himself sideways onto Ahn-Kha. Cannon shells tore through the gap between the floors of the garage, ripping apart the van. The Arkansan fell with a softball-sized hunk of flesh torn away from his neck and shoulder, and Valentine dully thought that he'd have to learn the man's name in order to put it in the report, and then the cannonade was over.

Lewis stared stupidly around, still kneeling next to the van, in the exact same position he'd been in a second ago, still holding the field phone to his ear.

Valentine heard the first
BOOM
of shellfire landing on the field. The artillery had come at last.

Valentine stood between the shell holes on the overgrown, cracked landing strip and surveyed the mess.

What was left of the attackers from the vehicles and the defenders of the garages had encircled the two holes and the downed helicopter. Valentine had seen Post borne away in a stretcher, but couldn't do anything but touch a bloodily peeled hand as the bearers rushed him to the medical unit.

The mysterious air raiders had rocketed their own helicopter before leaving, blowing what was left of the double-rotor airship into three substantial chunks—pilot cabin, part of the cargo area, and stabilizing tail.

The odd, green propane-tank capsule remained in the wreckage. Flames slid off it like oil from Teflon.

The Bears kept watch from the overturned earth of the Kurian wormhole. Valentine had poked his head in—the three-meter-diameter tunnel was ringed with strands of whitish goo about the thickness of his thumb, crisscrossed and spiderwebbed like the frosting dribbled atop a Bundt cake. Whether the digging worm creature (someone called it a “bore worm” but Valentine didn't know if the term came from
Hitchen's Guide to Introduced Species
or if the would-be zoologist had thought it up on the spot). The Bears also watched a pair of wounded prisoners, survivors of the transport helicopter who hadn't made it to the rescuing craft. A medic dressed a cut on one pilot's scalp just below the helmet line. The stranger submitted to the ministrations with something like dull contempt. The aircrew were lean, well-tanned men with oversized sunglasses and desert scarves. Both wore leather jackets with a panel stitched on the back, reading in English and Spanish:

NONNEGOTIABLE $10,000 GOLD REWARD
for the safe return of this pilot unharmed and
healthy to Pyp's Flying Circus
YUMA
ARIZONA/AZTLAN
.
Negotiable traveling and
keep expenses also paid in trade goods.
CONTACT
PROVOST FT CHICO OR NEW UNIVERSAL
CHURCH—TEMPE DIRECTORATE FOR
INFORMATION AND DIRECTIONS

Each also had a patch reading PYP'S FLYING CIRCUS, featuring a winged rattlesnake, flying with mouth open as though to strike.

So the question of
Who the hell are these guys?
was answered. With another question.

But Valentine's mind was on that tank in the center of the wreckage.

Some of the men theorized it contained a nuclear bomb. Valentine suspected that the contents were a good deal more lethal to the human race long-term.

And everyone was looking at him.

Valentine paced at the edge of the wormhole.

“Nail, I want three Bears ready with demolition blocks. I don't know if it'll dent that thing, but it might rattle them.”

Nail was a pigeon-chested Bear with long, sun-lightened blond hair, wearing captain's bars. Nail had been promoted after the fight on Big Rock Mountain, and was the leader of the toughest soldiers in the Razors . . . and probably Texas, in Valentine's opinion—and that meant the world, if you asked a Texan, but Valentine had learned not to argue with Texans in matters of regional pride.