The bulletproof glass resisted most of the onslaught, but several windows cracked under the pressure of the constant bombardment.
Now clear of the bridge, the train rolled around a sharp curve, Fitz pushing computer control buttons like mad, trying to get every ounce of speed out of the remaining Dash-8
locomotives.
Hunter jammed his throttle forward and was soon flying over the lead locomotive, matching its speed exactly. The bandits crawling on the roofs of the railway cars looked like a pack of human-size spiders. Hunter knew that he would have to help get them off, yet he didn't want to light up his cannons for fear of damaging the train.
Instead he dropped the Harrier down to a point just ten feet off the top of the train. Then deftly lowering his vertical thruster deflectors, he was able to blow off a number of bandits from the roof by brutally scorching them with his downward pointing, red-hot jet engine exhaust blast.
Inside a half minute, the roof of the train was cleared of the enemy.
But suddenly a new threat appeared.
As the
Express
roared down onto the canyon rim itself, both Fitz and Hunter saw that the mighty train was barreling headlong toward a huge pile of rocks blocking the tracks straight ahead.
A Football City Ranger combat engineer named Spreat was the chief driver of the train. Viewing the pile of boulders on his closed-circuit TV screen, he frantically radioed back to Fitzgerald in the Control car.
"Do you see what's up ahead?" he yelled. "We've got to stop!"
Both Fitz and Crossbow had already seen the blockade.
"Could they be fake?" Fitz asked Crossbow, remembering back to the line of cardboard "brick" walls and the flash bombs on the Desert Point View Bridge.
The Indian shook his head. "I don't think we've got the time to find out."
Fitz knew he was right; there was no time to think about the choices or the consequences. Both sides of the tracks had come alive again with small arms fire, interspersed with some increasingly heavy artillery shelling. To stop the train now was tantamount to capitulation.
Relying strictly on his instincts, Fitz called ahead to Spreat: "Any way of telling whether those might be props or not?"
"They look damn real from here!" came the instantaneous reply.
"Then what happens if we don't stop?" Fitz urgently radioed back. "What happens if we give it everything we've got and they turn out to be real?"
There was just a slight delay before the engineer replied.
"Jeesuz, I don't know," Spreat called back. "I know these Dash-8's pack a lot of power, but - " "If we stop now, we're dead,"
Fitz cut in. "I say, boot it -
full speed
!"
Spreat relayed the order to his computers. Within a
split-second, each of the locomotives hauling the massive train received the command. The powerful engines responded, and the
Freedom Express
hurtled toward the barrier of rocks at a deadly speed.
Fitz had his face pressed up against the bulletproof window and was screaming back to Crossbow: "Keep your fingers crossed
. . . they might be fakes!"
They weren't. . . . The train hit the boulders with such force that the nose of the first locomotive was completely shattered, sending chunks of steel flying everywhere. But the train kept going, driving with relentless force against the pile of rocks. Two, three locomotives were smashed; still the
Freedom
Express
drove forward. Finally the train broke through as the last of the huge rocks was blasted from the tracks.
"
Goddamn
!" Fitz yelled. "Even I hope they got that on film!"
Billy Lee Riggs taxied to the head of the line of F101
Voodoos that were waiting at the Grand Canyon airport, their engines roaring.
Suddenly his radio crackled to life.
"Triple-K flight," said the voice from the speaker. "You're on."
Riggs checked the last page of his script, and then strapped on his oxygen mask.
"OK, guys," he called to the seventeen other pilots. "Just like we rehearsed it. Six flights of threes, starting at Alpha-One. Check?"
"Check!" came the chorus of replies.
"Roger," Riggs said, popping his brakes and gunning his own engines. "Alpha One, follow me."
By now the first full streaks of the sunrise were appearing in the eastern sky. The deep blackness of the canyon depths were slowly turning into murky, misty shades of gray.
Hunter's inborn radar was flashing like crazy when he saw the first six Voodoos appear out of the south. At the same moment, he heard the radio calls of the Coaster Air Force fighters approaching from the west, the very familiar voice of JT and Ben Wa being mixed in.
Turning back toward the Voodoos, he saw they were climbing up to fifteen thousand feet, much too high to begin a strafing attack on the train. Within a half minute, they had leveled off and banked into a large circular flight pattern. Hunter recognized the tactic right away as an umbrella formation.
"Red flight, this is Blue, do you copy?" Hunter keyed in his radio mike. "This is Red flight."
"Hey, Hawk!" JT called over. "What the hell are you getting us into here? We just flew over the canyon rim, and it looks like something out of a Hollywood nightmare."
"Couldn't say it any better myself," Hunter replied. "This is one movie we won't have to wait to see."
They quickly discussed the orbiting Voodoos.
"Just waiting for us to come up and meet them," Ben Wa radioed over. "So their buddies can jump the train."
"How about we give them a 'burst," Hunter replied. "With a three-king finisher?"
Being former Thunderbird pilots, Ben and JT knew exactly what Hunter was proposing. As the flight of five Coaster F-5's dove and formed a low CAP over the train, Hunter, Ben and JT
quickly formed up ten thousand feet below the circling Voodoos.
"Any idea who these guys are?" JT inquired of Hunter.
"We'll know soon enough," Hunter replied, arming two of his four Sidewinders. "On three . . . one . . . two. . . ."
On the next heartbeat, the two Strikefighters and the
Harrier booted their engines and zoomed up into true vertical climbs, their three airplanes forming a triad that looked like a huge dagger heading for the heart of the Voodoos' orbiting pattern.
Within seconds, they roared through the line of F101's.
Then, with exquisite split-second timing, the three airplanes turned over and came screaming down in a three-pronged dive, perfectly completing the old Thunderbird demonstration stunt known as the starburst.
The United American fighters had moved so fast, the KKK
pilots didn't have time to react. Suddenly three of them were being chased by a like number of Sidewinders. Three puffs of smoke later, the sky was filled with pieces of burning, tumbling Voodoo wreckage.
Their stunt only half over, the three fighters continued their earth-shattering dive, arriving back at five thousand feet just as the first trio of reserve Voodoos were making their move toward the train.
Hunter bore in on the lead F-101, ripping a large gaping hole in its wing with two solid blasts from his Aden cannons.
The Voodoo began to smoke and spin downward, its pilot punching out just a second before its wing fell off. It was only then-when Hunter got his first good look at the emblem on the F-101 's busted wing-did he realize that they were fighting against the KKK Air Force.
"There's your answer, JT," Hunter said, indicating the fluttering Voodoo wing. "It's the scumbag of scumbags' air force. It had to be their airplanes that attacked LA too."
"The Klan?" JT called back. "I didn't think any of those guys were smart enough to fly."
"Me, neither," Hunter replied. "But they just made a hard job a little easier for me." As the aerial battle continued, Hunter and his allies dueled with the numerically superior but less-skilled force of the KKK Air Force. Although the Harrier was slower than the Voodoos, its incredible versatility, plus Hunter's extraordinary flying talents, more than evened the score. Time after time, a KKKAF pilot had Hunter in his sights, only to find that the Harrier had somehow disappeared. Seconds later, a missile would rip into the Klansman's airplane, and his last earthly thought was along the lines of "Where in the fuck did that come from?"
By now, a second wave of Coaster F-5's had arrived, but so had another nine Voodoos. Devillian's fleet of Hind helicopters was also cued, to be countered by the out-numbered but
nevertheless effective Cobra Brothers. The ever-lightening sky over the Grand Canyon was now filled with flashes of gunfire, streaks of smoke, and sudden bursts of brilliant flames as airplanes exploded.
Then on Hunter's call, the United American airplanes
suddenly evacuated the area. A snap second later, the roofs of four of the train's SAM railway cars clanged open, and a massive barrage of SA-2 surface-to-air missiles were launched. Four Voodoos fell victim to the SAMs, the roofs of the SAM cars clanging shut almost immediately after the missiles were away.
Far below, in the guts of the gorge, the
Freedom Express
rumbled on, assaulted on all sides by recoiless rifles, bazookas, steady waves of rifle fire, grenades and
flamethrowers. All the while the Football City Rangers were pouring the fire right back, in some cases deflecting their artillery gun muzzles down to level and firing away at
point-blank range. Several railway cars caught on fire -from the enemy fire as well as the close-in muzzle flashes -but the Rangers assigned to fire duty managed to douse the flames quickly.
In the midst of the hundreds of enemy soldiers firing at them, the Football City Rangers also saw dozens of cameramen, lighting technicians, and sound men. Huge, bright klieg lights would nearly blind them at every turn. Wires, ropes, cables and perches made of scaffolding were everywhere. The presence of the massive filming crew only added to the unbelievable and surreal pandemonium.
Yet in a testament to their moral values, the Rangers
couldn't bring themselves to fire directly at the unarmed members of the film crew. Instead they sought to destroy their cameras, lights and sound equipment whenever possible, the TOW
antitank missiles being the weapon of choice for this job.
Through it all, Fitz and Crossbow were everywhere directing the fire-fighting, encouraging the soldiers, firing out of broken windows with their own M-16's whenever they had the chance-all the while staying in touch via radio with Hunter overhead.
"We've already gone a mile and a half!" Fitz yelled to Crossbow at one point.
But that still left eight and a half miles to go. ...
"Where's that fucking script girl!" Devillian screamed as he watched the relentless and ongoing air and ground battle from his high-perched command post.
A scantily clad young blonde-she had played a role in an earlier White Power Fuck Movie-ran up, her hands full of notebooks and long sheets of paper.
"What the fuck is coming next?!" Devillian demanded of her.
She quickly consulted the appropriate script pages.
"There's gas attack scene at Mile Three," she said hurriedly. "Then the Mexican Cavalry guys come in. Their cue is a smoke bomb explosion at Mile Three and Three Quarters."
Devillian threw away his high-powered binoculars in a rage.
"It's moving too fast!" he raged. "The pacing is all fucked up now." He grabbed his radio. "Where are those fucking bombers?!" he screamed so loudly that the vibration on the other end of the line nearly busted Tony Three's eardrum. "Last report they were orbiting at thirty miles south," he told Devillian, checking his schedule sheet for the position of the four B-57
mercenary bombers.
"Well, call them and tell 'em to get their asses over here now!" Devillian screamed through the line. "They might be going on earlier."
Tony Three gladly hung up on the terrorist leader and
radioed the flight commander of the bomber force.
"What do you mean, go in early?" a nasty Austrian named Shinz replied. "Those fighters will pick us off in a minute."
"Just do it," Tony Three wheezed back at the man. "Or you'll never fly again."
There was a brief burst of static, then Shinz radioed back:
"OK, but we're definitely going to have a meeting on this after this is over!"
"Yeah, sure," Tony Three replied. "And I'll bring the doughnuts, asshole."
At that moment, the Harrier roared right over Tony Three's position, its Aden guns blazing away at a wildly jinking, yet already doomed KKK Voodoo.
Knowing what the United American pilots would do to the slow bombers, Tony Three immediately thought of Shinz and his pilots.
"Those guys should get a new agent," he mumbled.
As their airplanes were shot from the skies by Hunter and his mates, the Burning Cross stage commanders simply called for reinforcements and wave after wave of Voodoos, as well as the few remaining mesatop based Floggers and Mirages, joined the attack. Meanwhile, as the train passed Mile Two and A Half, huge guns of all types were hurling tons of ammunition against the walls of the train.
Yet the
Freedom Express
kept driving forward. As he was gunning down still another Klansman, Hunter suddenly felt bigger planes were approaching.