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- James Axler Outlander 26 Sea of Plague
- James Blish Seedling Stars 1 Seeding Program
- James Doohan Flight Engineer Volume 1 The Rising
- James Axler Deathlands 00 Encounter
- Hogan, James P Giants 5 Mission to Minerva
- James Craig Milcz nawet po mierci
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"No. Chinooks. The Hunters. Warn the McGills and then jump aboard. Need to back get
over the crest behind us. Chance they won't spot us in dead ground." But he was stricken
at how suddenly hopeless the woman sounded.
"TWO BANDITS, south and east, General. Choppers, closing in on us."
Zelig was standing up, head and shoulders out of the top hatch, looking down and in
front of his six-vehicle convoy. There seemed to be a large lake, with a dam at the
southern end. It looked as if the valley ran steeply away, but the blacktop didn't give him
enough of a vantage point.
The voice of the radioman came crackling through his headphones, repeating the
warning.
Zelig switched on his throat mike. "Range?"
"Less than five miles, General."
"Pass it on to the others. I'm coming down and sealing off. Could be getting warm in a
couple of minutes."
The line of M113s, two towing the fuel tanks, ground on up the hill, closing with the
helicopters.
"APCS, CHIEF!" The voice cracked with the sudden excitement. "Six of the fuckers. Got
to be Zelig and his men."
Margaret Tabor was sitting behind the copilot and she leaned forward, gripping him by
the shoulder, her fingers biting so hard that he actually yelped in pain. But she was too
carried away to even notice.
The Chinooks had come in from the south, over a region of total wilderness, seamed with
narrow valleys and the tumbled remains of thousands of dead pine trees. They had seen
no evidence of any human life at all, though the observers had twice reported seeing
packs of large dogs ranging over the bleak ravines. Once there had also been a grizzly. A
humpbacked brindled sow, with two cubs following as she loped along the ridges.
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EarthBlood
Pockets of snow still lay in the hollows, though the recent change to warmer weather had
melted most of it. Tracks were slimed with mud, and every watercourse that they
swooped over was filled to overflowing.
Now, strung out along a snaking road, the Chief of the Hunters of the Sun saw what she'd
been waiting for. The convoy of camouflaged armored personnel carriers was moving
slowly along toward a valley headed by a dammed lake. Just below them on the right was
the burned-out shell of what had once been a sizable mansion with its own tennis court.
Every eye in the choppers was glued to the tracked vehicles as they roared five hundred
feet above them.
Not one eye looked in the other direction, where they would have seen two battered farm
tractors, each one towing a dirty horse trailer, vanishing over the ridge on the western
flank of the same valley.
THE MOMENT they were into the dead ground, where the road dropped steeply and
there were groves of tall, dead trees, Nanci pulled off the blacktop, threw on the brake,
killed the engine and leapt from the cab. She yelled for the others to get out of the
trailers. "On foot, as far as we can!"
"We can take cover among the trees," shouted Jim, helping Sly and Heather from the
horse trailer, making sure that Carrie was also safe. Behind him the McGills were all
getting out.
"Yeah. Do it now. They'll have machine guns on the Chinooks. Rip us apart if they spot
us."
Jim led the way in among the twisted and blackened branches of the pines, picking a path
toward the crest of the slope, where they would be able to look down into the valley and
see what the helicopters were doing.
"Think the vehicles are hidden all right?" panted Carrie, at his heels.
"Best we can do," he replied.
But as soon as he neared the fringe of the trees, holding up a hand to warn the others not
to go too far, Jim realized that the pair of Chinook CH-47Ms had other fish to fry.
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It was a bizarre scene, like something out of an old Vietnam vid from seventy years ago.
The far side of the dam, where another road rolled out of sight to the north, a straggling
line of tracked personnel carriers had stopped. Men were pouring out of them, and they
could hear the faint crackle of small-arms fire. A small group were struggling to set up a
grenade-launching tripod.
"Missile," said Nanci, throwing herself flat in the dirt at Jim's elbow.
"What?"
"Erecting a 155 mm launcher. Probably got a laser-guided system for an antitank missile.
And they're going to use it against the Hunters' Chinooks." She paused, shading her eyes
with her hand. "Although, it looks to me like they've only got the one missile. Could be
an old Silverhead. They'd better make it count or they'll get themselves minced sitting out
there."
"Where's whirlybirds?" panted Sly, sitting down with his back against the stump of an
old ponderosa, wheezing like an old man who'd just completed a marathon.
The choppers had momentarily vanished, though everyone could still hear the sound of
their rotors, over beyond the far end of the swollen lake.
"They'll come back on a strafing run and leave a lot of blood in the dirt there," said
Henderson McGill, holding little Sukie in his arms, wrapped in a plaid blanket.
"THEY'VE TURNED, General."
Zelig was watching through glasses. "I see them. They will open up as they pass by. We
have to hit the first one with the Silverhead. Won't get a second chance."
"Ready, sir!" yelled the freckled sergeant in charge of the launching system for the
missile.
"READY!" shouted Margaret Tabor in the second of the big choppers.
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EarthBlood
Chapter Thirty-Three
It was possibly the most important single battle ever fought on the soil of the American
continent.
Lexington, Chancellorsville, Bunker Hill, the Alamo, First Bull Run, Fort Sumter& the
list of major engagements is endless. But the skirmish between two helicopters and half a
dozen armored personnel carriers in a nameless valley in Oregon in late December of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]