Dark Dragons (32 page)

It took him only a second to decide what to do next. 
He walked over to a Dumpster and tossed the alien’s beacon inside and headed
for a tall oak tree on the other side of the parking lot. 
There——
a
nice heavy branch about twenty feet up to give himself altitude
advantage.  He aimed the hoist-cable gun on his right forearm and used the
manual fire button.  The shaped charge missed the branch, however, and the
wire spool ran itself out.  Wishing for the tenth time he had his helmet,
Darren detached the spool with a second button and took better aim.  This
time he struck under the branch and walked himself up the tree like a rock
climber, the little reel motor in the gun having no problem with his weight. 
He parked himself in the nook of the branch.

Behind him, he could hear a large transport jet taking
off.  True to military form, everyone here seemed to be up before the
crack of dawn before most civilians.  A lot of military and civilian
vehicles were moving about: Humvees, GM pick-ups, sedans, even an M1A2 tank on
the west end of the base.  He spotted here and there a few people walking
in the distance, too.  The place was definitely getting busier even though
it had to be around five in the morning.  The sun had yet to show itself
but orange began to glow on the eastern horizon.  Anybody on the ground
below could now look up and easily spot him.

Darren pulled the rifle holster’s manual release lever on
the left shoulder plate and seized the weapon with his right hand, the hoist
cable still attached to him.  He had a five-round grenade clip already
loaded and he selected——manually with a small button pad on the EPG
launcher——the first grenade for proximity detonation and the last four for
direct-impact.  His eyes had never left the area around the Dumpster.

The Vorvon of course could have already been watching him
for the past ten minutes and had his little ambush foiled from the start. 
Darren told himself to be cool, positive, and think like a sniper in his nest. 
Wait for the enemy to poke his head up, or in this case look for the ionizing
sparkle of superheated air agitated by an invisible pulse weapon firing.

Several minutes had passed watching the Dumpster and
resisting all movement, when he had a moment of ominous clarity, a thought he
had not considered, and he knew he had put himself in peril if he did not
correct it quickly.  There was no reason to believe that the Vorvon did
not have an Incoming Fire Sensor.  The moment Darren burped a grenade, the
bad guy would instantly have his location, especially since the grenades didn’t
travel very fast.  Darren had nowhere to go to avoid return fire. 
Except twenty feet down.  Acquiring the high ground hadn’t necessarily
given him an advantage.

Darren was about to lower himself with the hoist-cable, when
a vicious round of flashing bursts erupted across the Dumpster’s surface. 
He spotted the ionizing glow from the alien’s invisible weapon, aimed and fired
the EPG.  The moment the grenade was halfway home, the Vorvon’s laser
blasts suddenly swept across the parking lot and toward him.  The grenade
exploded a few feet from the alien’s position as Darren leapt out of the tree
on his cable.

Shrapnel tore through the air in a thousand directions followed
by a satisfying shriek of pain.  The invisibility cloak flickered once and
finally malfunctioned while the alien stumbled back under the shock of the
explosion.  Now that he could see his opponent, Darren fired the remaining
four grenades primed for direct impact, but his attacker was already in the air
before they found the mark.  All four exploded with thunderous echoes
across Los Alamitos Airfield.  Every soldier would be spilling their
coffee and running to investigate now.

Darren detached himself and ran back toward the large bush
he had landed in next to the street.  He hadn’t killed the Vorvon but at
least he would be able to see the damn thing.  Across the street toward
the runway, he spotted a large building with several more dark spots for
concealment, and Darren hauled his ass across the pavement in a jagged zig-zag
movement.

Flash!——he suddenly found himself airborne, flying forward,
and he landed on his chest.  He knew the laser bolt had come from an
oblique angle or he would have been lights out dead.  The armor may have
repelled the angled pulse but not the kinetic force.  Another blast kicked
up pieces of pavement as he got to his feet . . . more vollies of fire as he
sailed over a hedge and rolled behind the building.   He spat dirt and
somehow stumbled to his feet again, raising his weapon to kill, but the alien
flew out of sight toward the west and disappeared into the dark sky.

Neither of them was getting off good, direct shots. 
This strange battle was waging on far too long.  One of them would
eventually get lucky, though, and the other would die.  That simple.

Darren went to the other side of the building, checked the
area and dashed across the parking lot to the steel door of a single-story
building, this one smaller with no lights on.  Locked.  He wanted to
find a hiding spot inside so he could lay low and plot his next move. 
Shit was moving way too fast.

Mounted on the wall next to the door was a caged access
ladder.  He powered down his weapon, which also made it quieter, and put a
shot into the ladder’s security hatch.  Maybe there was a vent on the roof
to gain entrance.  Darren slapped his pulse rifle into the back holster
and climbed the twelve feet up to the roof.

Darren spotted the control tower to his left and a single helicopter
with an artillery gun slowly descending for a landing, a flatbed truck waiting
for the chopper’s cargo directly underneath it.  At least twenty other
Blackhawk and Huey helicopters were already on the pad, their rotors slowing.

*

The pilot kept his Blackhawk steady, despite the strong
Santa Anna winds buffeting his whirly bird and the 105mm Howitzer dangling from
the belly.  The single technician on the ground waved his light cone to
starboard, and the pilot obeyed the direction.

Behind him, the starboard cabin door blew inward with a
resounding concussion that sent the crew chief sailing head first into the
opposite door.  The pilot reflexively tightened his grip on the cyclic and
jerked the Blackhawk in response.  A nightmare apparition appeared in the
doorway, peering in at the pilot with huge yellow eyes behind a helmeted
faceplate, an inhuman growl coming through gnashing teeth.

The alien jumped in and aimed its steely weapon.  A
pair of laser bursts cut the humans down in their seats in a hail of blood that
showered the windshield.  The creature snatched the dead crew chief by the
helmet and launched his limp body out of the cabin.

The helicopter’s turboshafts were still idling.

*

Darren had no clue what the alien was thinking or
planning.  Did it know how to fly a helicopter?  Maybe it reasoned
that the only next step was to do something unpredictable as Darren had done
back on the channel overpass.  The alien had lost the advantage of
invisibility and therefore its edge, now fighting at his level.

The helicopter was slowly spinning down toward the
tarmac.  The technician on the ground had seen what had happened and was
already hightailing it toward the control tower.  The artillery piece
landed on the tarmac next to the flatbed truck, the helicopter above it
following it down as well.  It touched down hard on top of the truck,
still gyrating around and threatening to tip sideways off the vehicle.  To
Darren’s disappointment, the Blackhawk came to a halt before it could fall off
and explode and send the alien’s smoking carcass shooting into the air.

Let me oblige.
  Darren could just pump a single
grenade into the chopper and be done with the whole fucking affair.  One
loud boom to finish the game.  He pulled the holster’s manual release
lever to eject his pulse rifle.  Nothing.  A quick pang bit him in
the chest.

Darren pulled it again . . . and again, but the holster
refused to detach his weapon.  He kept pulling the lever, even though he
realized the alien had damaged the release mechanism when it shot him in the
back earlier.

The thought of somehow escaping off the base to get his
buddies passed through Darren’s mind——he had already eliminated the alien’s
ability to track him——but that idea quickly evaporated when he realized he
couldn’t leave.  He had to finish the alien now, somehow, or it would
return, next time with friends.  Blind rage, the same memory-inserted
response that tore through him back at the house, suddenly came out of him like
a shotgun scatter, and he stepped off the roof to the concrete twelve feet
below.  He drew his needle pistol and activated the weapon.

Up and running toward the Blackhawk still idling on the
flatbed . . . he spotted people on the corner of his eye waving at him. 
Security personnel armed with submachine guns were pouring out of the control
tower building, their shouts silent under the helicopter’s turboshaft engines.

The helicopter had landed on the flatbed pointing southwest,
so Darren had to approach in a wide arc from the northeast to avoid the Vorvon
spotting him.  With the rotors whipping his hair and the stench of burning
aviation fuel filling his nostrils, Darren leapt onto the flatbed just behind
and under the Blackhawk’s starboard door which the alien had blown off.

He crawled forward, stood up, and was about to hose the
cabin, but the alien had been waiting for him.  One round struck the
creature’s helmet and shattered the visor before it lunged forward and hurled
him inside into the aviator’s seat, jarring the pilot’s corpse off the chair
onto the cyclic stick.  The dead man bounced off the dash and back against
the collective throttle, and the Blackhawk’s turboshaft engines suddenly
howled.  The helicopter leapt forward off the flatbed like a gazelle.

Darren strained to get himself upright against the
helicopter’s forward momentum, and knocked the alien’s weapon out of its grip,
then jammed his boot into its mid-section as hard as he could, sending the
snarling behemoth backward.  It wasn’t enough to hurt or even confuse
it.  The maneuver did provide Darren enough time to kick the Vorvon’s
cannon out the door and witness the events about to take place outside.

The artillery gun still attached to the Blackhawk snagged
itself in between the flatbed’s cab and the deck.  The chopper’s ten
mile-per-hour advance came to a wobbling halt, but forward momentum shoved
Darren and the alien forward into the blood-splattered windshield along with
the dead copilot.

The crazy motion caused him to fire his needle pistol, and
the round exploded against  the floor, tearing out a huge hole.  The
alien shoved him away back to the rear of the cabin.

Something else seemed to be in control of him now, and he
was scared.  Scared because he liked it——the wild sensations pumping
inside him, the gratifying desire for chaos and reckless action. 
Everything around him seemed to move with rapid, blurry coordination teetering
on the brink of potential anarchy, a miscalculated move threatening to summon
death and inertness like organized traffic suddenly exploding into a fiery dance
of somersaulting cars, twisting bodies and bouncing tires.  And,
strangely, he was getting off on it.

Darren watched with stunned curiosity as the alien seized
the dead pilot by the neck and shoved the body down onto the control sticks,
winding the rotors up harder.  The creature appeared to be aroused by the
violence as well and wished to contribute to the turmoil.  The Blackhawk
lunged forward and began to drag the flatbed truck sideways.  The vehicle
was about to tip over on its side.  When it did, the gas tank ruptured and
spewed vulnerable fuel across the pad.  On the ground, airfield personnel
scrambled in the chaos.  Yellow-green firetrucks were approaching with the
red-and-whites- flashing.

Darren had dropped his needle pistol, and he couldn’t find
the damn thing.  This situation was already out of control and threatening
to get worst.  He wanted to plan his moves, to reason, but there wasn’t
time.  The Blackhawk continued to drag the overturned flatbed with the
artillery gun tangled up in the vehicle’s frame like a demented dog leashed to
a hapless owner . . . and still the cable refused to snap.

However, the big gun finally separated from the truck, and
the helicopter dramatically accelerated, not upward but forward, thirty or
forty feet off the deck, dragging the bouncing, disintegrating artillery piece
behind it.  One of the firetrucks swerved to avoid the collision, and the
helicopter continued to race across the tarmac toward a small building with
several trucks parked next to it——white tanker trucks with
FLAMMABLE - NO SMOKING WITHIN 50 FEET
painted
on their sides.

Of course!
  Darren turned and raced for the
doorway and the violence outside, ready to jump and take his chances, but the
helicopter was just too high.

He felt the helicopter jerk brutally, as he knew the
artillery gun had found one of the fuel trucks.  The deafening explosion
sent a billowing mountain of fiery debris in a million directions, and the
inside of the helicopter lit up in orange.  Blue sky above suddenly
disappeared behind a boiling fire of aviation gas which engulfed the Blackhawk,
the rotors fanning the flames into the cabin and across the ceiling. 
Darren could taste the burning stench as it seared his nostrils.  Gagging,
he got to his feet and searched for the doorway in the smoke, no longer
concerned about the helicopter’s altitude.

The explosion must have severed the cable mooring the
chopper to the artillery gun because the bird was vaulting forward and
up.  Darren felt centrifugal force push him to the floor.  The
helicopter was indeed climbing——fast.

He glanced out the open doorway for a split second, just
enough to see how quickly the helicopter was really moving.  Streets and
houses began to go gray and fade in detail.  The chopper was moving north
toward downtown L.A. and still climbing.