She took her cap off, shook her hair out, and ripped the glasses off, and shouted, “I am your work, stupid!”
“Put the chopper down,” he shouted into his throat mike. “Put the hat and glasses back on,” he shouted at Henty. He looked behind him to make quite sure his leverage — Petey and the surgeon — were right there. They were. All of a sudden the world glowed. He would live. He would triumph. The Don would give him a bonus, he'd retire and live happily ever after.
Henty stood well back from the open hatch of the chopper, holding onto her cap and glasses so that the wind from the rotors didn’t blow them away.
“Come on!” Jimmy Twoshoes shouted impatiently. Behind Henty he could see the bounty hunters on the bridge start paying attention to why a chopper was landing for a woman so near them.
A woman with her arm in some kind of a cast! It was a wonder they hadn’t grabbed her yet!
Henty was peering into the chopper to make sure Petey and Chris were there. If they weren’t, the Syndicate thug would have to fetch them first, though how she would make him do it, she had no idea. In fact, she was wondering - sort of in a distant part of her mind, like it was happening to somebody else she didn’t know very well — why he didn’t just kill her right there. (Because the Syndicate had also taken billions in bets that she would never make it to San Francisco, and she wasn’t in San Francisco. Yet.)
“Get her!” Jimmy Twoshoes ordered the two soldiers he had brought along to look after Petey and the surgeon.
They jumped out to do his bidding as Henty recognized Petey and Chris in the shadows of the chopper. Henty ducked between the two of them and jumped into the chopper just as the first bounty-hunter shouted. “That’s her! There! Get her!”
One of the Syndicate thugs started shooting at the bounty hunters, the other turned to run for the chopper. The pilot took the chopper up. The thug got his fingers on the lower edge of the hatch but Henty gave his knuckles a light tap with her lead cast and he fell away to the bounty hunters. They fired at the chopper, which the pilot now slid away in a big hurry, but low, so that he could hide it behind the lines of trucks. Henty paid them scant attention.
Henty and Jimmy Twoshoes stood looking at each other for a long moment, then his hand dipped into his jacket. In that instant Henty knew that what everyone said about his plan to betray their deal and kill Petey and Chris was the truth. But still she waited until he actually brought the zipgun out before tapping him smartly over the wrist with her left hand in the lead cast.
He screamed as the bone broke. The zipgun fell away. Chris caught it neatly and promptly stuck it in the back of the pilot’s neck.
‘”We got a deal,” Jimmy Twoshoes said. “You take your fall in front of the Mint. How’re you going to get there, huh?”
“We had a deal,” Henty said easily. “But you never intended letting Petey go. As for getting to the Mint, that’s easy. We’re to flying there in this chopper.”
“Not me,” said Jimmy Twoshoes firmly. “I want to live.”
Behind and below them a bounty hunter lined them up in the sights of his mail-order bazooka. He squeezed the trigger with loving care.
The bazooka hit a truck between the chopper and the bounty hunter. The shock wave of the truck exploding tilted the helicopter so that the rotors nearly dug into the ground. Jimmy Twoshoes staggered towards the open hatch. Henty hooked her cast-encased arm around an upright pole and caught him with her right hand to haul him back in. Chris held onto the back of the pilot’s seat and stayed where he was. Petey’s bed was strapped to the floor and the blankets tucked in with enough precision to hold him firmly in the bed.
“Round here, none of us will live very long,” the pilot gasped as a truck-driver on the ground decided enough was enough and opened up on the bounty hunters with a machine pistol he carried in his truck.
“Right,” Henty said. “First we put Petey down, then we fly to San Francisco.”
“No.” Chris the surgeon said. “You can’t put Petey down. There’s nowhere within a hundred miles he'll be safe from the mobs. He has to go with you.”
Henty thought only briefly. “Okay. Chris, we’ll put you down then.”
“Nope. I've come too far on this ride to jump off now.”
“I’m not flying into that,” the pilot said, pointing to the air that was black with planes over San Francisco. “They all have radios tuned to the Fist’s frequency.”
Henty held the lead cast in front of his eyes. “It went off the air, see?”
“So, all the same. You reach the Mint, how will you get in without getting us all killed? No, thank you!”
“Did you plan to use that rifle to kill me at the Mint?” Henty asked Jimmy Twoshoes, pointing at the built-in gun-rack.
He shook his head. “Too uncertain. Anti-personnel mines, in that box there.”
“And hundreds of people with me,” Henty said. “You have no conscience.”
“I’m only doing my job.”
“Pfft!” To the pilot, Henty said, “About the roof of the Mint...”
CHAPTER 72
The Future is not what it used to be. — Restroom Graffiti
Two more trucks exploded almost simultaneously. There was now a full scale battle between the teamsters and the bounty hunters, with not only bullets but grenades and rockets flying.
The chopper slid smoothly from the uncertain shelter of the lines of trucks and hovered over the middle of the bay, halfway between Oakland and San Francisco.
Henty looked through the plastic at Petey. He gave her thumbs up with one hand and an O of approval with the thumb and middle finger of the other hand. “I knew they'd never vaporize you,” he said. “I knew you'd come for me.”
“Everything’s going to be A-one,” Henty said, though inwardly she didn’t feel so sure at all. The pilot was still holding the chopper over the middle of the bay.
Henty nudged Chris in the elbow so that the zipgun dug into the back of the pilot’s neck. “You have a choice. You can fly us to the Mint. Or you can jump.”
The pilot leaned forward to study the sea below him through the Perspex bubble. Then he looked at the choppers swarming over San Francisco and the huge saturnalian ring of planes circling higher up.
Suddenly, he let the chopper drop, flung off his belt and threw himself through the open hatch.
Jimmy Twoshoes also dived for the hatch but Henty caught his ankle and hauled him back. “Hold him!” she shouted at Chris.
The chopper still fell.
Henty dived for the driver’s seat. Her feet dropped onto the anti-torque pedals, the cast on her left hand pressed against the cyclic stick in front of her, while her right hand fell naturally to the collective pitch control lever between the seats. It wasn’t that Henty knew what these things were for but in the past few days she'd seen many chopper pilots in action.
The chopper was still falling towards the water. There was no time for tentative movements to familiarize herself with the controls. Henty just moved a lever. Though she didn’t know it, she had reduced the collective pitch. The motor roared and a needle shot into the red (there was also a lower red line, Henty noticed); what she should have done was to close the throttle slightly but Henty didn’t know this. Instead she hastily restored the pitch by moving the lever the other way again. By now she had other problems: the reduced torque effect which accompanied the reduced collective pitch had yawed the chopper to the left. The Fist, in its cast, pushed against the cyclic stick with more rightward force than was necessary. The aircraft immediately swung the other way. Henty corrected by punching the cyclic stick leftwards. Too much again. The pendulum swings grew larger and larger with every correction.
Below them, the pilot swam away frantically to avoid the chopper dropping on him.
The chopper’s skids touched the water and slowly, slowly, it started sinking away.
Henty saw the word THROTTLE and slammed it wide open. The hell with dials and red lines! The hell with fine correction
s, as long as they kept heading for the concentration of choppers over the Mint. The chopper seesawed back and forth and side to side in her inexpert hands because she just pressed pedals and pulled levers reactively, with no idea of what they did or how they were co-ordinated, but painfully aware that almost every control movement in a helicopter creates the need for another, and so on ad infinitum.
A boat appeared out of the water in front of them. They were only feet above the water, speeding nose-down for the San Francisco skyline. They would crash into the bridge of the boat. People dived overboard from the boat. Henty hauled on everything and the chopper cleared the boat by fractions of an inch, a skid taking the cap from the captain who was still stoically manning the flybridge — and cursing them roundly.
“Hey. I have problems of my own,” Henty replied to his shaking fist as she tried to level the chopper off.
Suddenly she had more problems. While her own chopper was still swinging this way and that, making sudden sickening chin-swoops and nose-dives alternating with attempts to soar heavenwards, they had arrived in the outer fringes of the choppers and planes over the Mint. Professional pilots of course spotted her cavorting as strictly amateur and gave way in a hurry but many of the choppers and planes were flown by licensed amateurs and they were inclined to contest the right of way...
One big black chopper just sat there. Henty headed straight for it. She tried turning her chopper to one side but it happened too slowly. At the last moment, when Henty could count the teeth of the other pilot — his mouth was open to shout obscenities at her — he gave way ever so fractionally and Henty’s chopper passed within inches with Henty holding her breath and clenching her teeth so that she shouldn’t move a muscle and cause a disaster.
Beyond the big black chopper the real nightmare began. The choppers were packed much closer than was safe, several layers deep. They were kept from disaster only by the skill of the pilots. But Henty wasn’t skilled enough even to hold her chopper steady, never mind holding position in a formation.
Another big chopper in front of her. Choppers to the left and the right. Choppers above. There was nowhere to go but down. They were almost upon the other chopper, whose pilot was jabbering on the radio at them. Henty dropped the chopper raggedly, her hands and feet moving frantically to correct for her over-corrections, which caused even more over-corrections.
“Watch out!” Chris shouted.
Henty saw the freeway at the end of the bridge coming at her at blinding speed. She reacted instinctively by taking the chopper up as fast as she could. Above her the other choppers shifted fractionally and she scraped through the minuscule hole in the air they made and very nearly went into the next layer up before they could make a little hole and the next layer and the next. Even when she broke through the topmost layer of choppers, it was only to emerge in a maelstrom of planes, including some low-flying Air Force fighters, one of which jetted right past the nose of her chopper so that its wake rocked the chopper frighteningly. For the first time, Petey screamed, and Henty made up her mind—
CHAPTER 72
High above San Francisco in the stratosphere where all is peace and quiet, a one-star general listened to the voice of the pilot coming through the speakers.
“I saw it. I tell you. The Fist, except she has a big cast on it.”
“So she suddenly learned to fly a chopper, with one hand in a cast?” another voice asked sarcastically.
“You saw how erratically that chopper flew across the Bay, didn’t you?”
The commander took the mike. “This is General Meggs. Can you take out just that one chopper?”
“Yes sir, sure sir,” said the pilot. “She’s gonna take a lot of other folks with her when she goes down though.”
“Never mind that, they’re not our responsibility as long as you don’t shoot them down directly. Go!”
“Sir! Thank you sir!”
Far below the communicator, the pilot heeled his fighter over and pushed the button to arm his rockets at the same time. In one-and-a-half seconds he would lock onto the chopper the Runner had stolen and blast her out of the sky. In five seconds he'd be back up here in the safety of clear skies inhabited only by other highly trained Air Force fighter pilots, rather than the dangerous amateur rabble down there. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the rest of his flight heeling over with him, the arms of the pilots reaching for the arming buttons, to back him up if he should miss. Bloody likely, ha-ha, he thought. A chopper is a sitting duck.
CHAPTER 74
“Look down now!” Chris shouted, pointing down to the almost solid mass of helicopters through which no more than the occasional glimpse of the city could be seen. “That copper roof is the Mint.”
Henty looked down. It was just a glimpse of a roof, more verdigris than copper-colored but she knew what Chris meant. A moment later even that sliver of roof was invisible as the mass of choppers shifted. Henty feared they would drift away and never find it again.
“Move the bombs to the door,” she told Chris. Into the mike, shouting to make herself heard over the hubbub of many ill-disciplined pilots: “Get the hell out of my way!”
Nothing moved, except the jets diving on her in formation through the planes circling above— Jets diving at her in formation!
“Watch out!” Chris shouted at the same time, having spotted the jets through the hatch as he arrived there dragging the box of anti-personnel mines. He grabbed a post with one hand and Petey’s bed with the other.
Henty dropped the chopper straight down, screaming into the mike, no words, just a mindless banzai scream as her rage at all the persecutions of the week and the unfairness of the Government setting the Air Force on her boiled over all at once.
Below her a chopper pilot scurried to move his chopper away from the screaming mad woman. His passengers were shooting off their rifles at the other chopper falling towards them and one was throwing a grenade at it, shouting, “That’s her, that’s her, get her, get her!”
The evading chopper crashed into another chopper and exploded and, from there, the explosions spread.
The grenade fell short of Henty’s chopper, kept falling and fell right onto a chopper piloted by a bounty hunter who had in three years accounted for as many Gauntlet Runners. When his chopper exploded, it left a neat hole for Henty’s chopper to fall through, though pieces shooting off it got into the rotors and engines of nearby choppers, spreading the conflagration.
The Air Force pilot who first spotted Henty had her in his sights with his finger a microsecond from pressing the button that would unleash his rockets on her when she seemed to drop out of the sky. Without hesitation, his hands and feet perfectly co-ordinated, his reflexes perfectly honed by years of expensive training to respond instantly to the irrational exigencies of war, he twitched the jet onto a new course to follow her down.
Behind him, his flight, who had been equally inculcated with the belief that to follow your comrades through thick and thin was their highest duty, until it became a reflex action, twitched their planes equally, simultaneously with his action, and dived after their leader into the melee..
Only the flight’s commanding officer, who felt slighted by General Meggs going over his head directly to order the pilot to attack — and who anyway didn’t believe the woman flying the chopper was Henty — turned his plane upwards, only to crash immediately into a light prop plane flown by a curious amateur pilot. Since the jet had over 1800 gallons of aerofuel on board, nothing of the men or the machines was left.
The pilot who'd gotten his orders directly from General Meggs now had a clear shot at Henty’s falling chopper. He blasted two rockets, then two more. They had not trailed ten yards from his plane when one hit an engine out of an exploded chopper. The bang this rocket made set all the other three off and pieces from the leading jet hit those following close by, exploding their armed rockets. All the jets fused into one large explosion that barreled over and over and over, like a giant Catherine-wheel, through t
he tightly packed choppers and planes adding more exploded planes and choppers wherever it touched, its fiery tentacles reaching hungrily for more combustibles and fuel, scathing a channel half a mile high by four miles long through the planes and choppers over the city of San Francisco, causing a rain of burning fuel and red-hot parts that—
Henty grimly kept her eyes in only one direction. Down. Down! Down! DOWN! She knew she could do nothing to avoid the other choppers if they didn’t want to give way. Then she could see a large expanse of verdigris and only one chopper between her and it.
“Move!” Henty shouted at it. And, miraculously, just then the pilot looked up, saw the conflagration above him and shot off in the direction of the bay to escape the carnage. He made a couple of hundred yards before a piece of Piper Cherokee slashed through the Perspex and cut the pilot quite gently on the forehead. Before he could wipe the blood from his eyes, he lost control and crashed into the Embarcadero Freeway.
“Bombs away!” Henty shouted.
Chris started throwing the anti-personnel mines out of the hatch. They were already armed: all he needed to do was ram the fitted fuse home and drop each one to fall towards the copper roof below where the impact exploded it. Then the nails and shrapnel and pieces of sharp plastic inside would tear into the soft roof and its supporting wooden members. Already a good-sized hole was forming but Henty was worried the chopper would fall into one of their own anti-personnel mines.
“That’s enough,” she shouted.
Chris looked at the mine in his hand He’d already pushed the fuse home. On the fuse it said. NO DELAY. He dropped it just as—
Henty slammed the throttle shut and the ignition off, then jerked the pitch control. Her idea was to make the chopper fall straight through the weakened roof, now not too far below them. Like most people, she believed that a chopper, once it loses its motive power, will fall like a stone. Now she discovered it isn’t true. The rotor, disconnected by the freewheel built into every helicopter, did not stop even though the direction of airflow through it was reversed from downwards to upwards. The chopper fell quite gently.