D. MacHale - The Soldiers of Halla

“Why don’t we go over land?” I asked. “Because I don’t want anything falling on anybody.” Good answer. I hoped we wouldn’t be the ones doing the falling.

“So we just try to lose him in the haze?” I asked. “That. Or I’ll drop him in the harbor.” Mark said that so matter-of-factly I actually believed he could do it.

“You have a plan for this or are you just winging it?”

He didn’t answer. Not good. We were approaching another bridge. The roadway loomed overhead. No sooner did we pass under it, than the roadbed exploded. The chasing helicopter was above us. Still shooting.

“You ever play chicken as a kid?” he asked.

“No, and neither did you.”

Mark laughed, as if remembering the geeky kid he used to be. That kid was long gone. “He’s not giving up. We’re going to have to play.”

There was a reason I never played chicken. It was dumb. It was a test of wills. There was no point to it other than to prove who was the bigger idiot. But this was Mark’s show. I wasn’t going to argue. We flew under another bridge. It could have been the Brooklyn Bridge. It was hard to tell. We were going too fast and I didn’t care anyway. Mark accelerated and drove us skyward again.

“We’ve got to get far enough ahead of him to make this work,” he explained.

The haze cleared a bit once we were over New York Harbor. It was still pretty thick, but visibility had increased slightly.

“He can see us now,” I cautioned. “Good. I want him to.”

Up ahead I saw the last bridge before open ocean. It was the long Verrazano Narrows Bridge that connected Brooklyn and Staten Island. Its two towers still stood tall.

Mark explained, “For whatever reason, this bridge is still pretty much intact.”

I twisted and looked back to see that the chasing helicopter had fallen far behind us. I caught glimpses of it through the haze to see it was just clearing the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Maybe we can lose it now,” I offered hopefully.

“No way. We’re in the open now. It’s going to have to end here. One way or the other.”

We flashed over the bridge, directly between the two towers. Mark pressed the chopper on, headed for open ocean.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we play.”

Mark banked the chopper hard, doing a one-eighty. In seconds we were on our way back toward the bridge, and directly for the other helicopter. We drifted to the left, headed toward the south tower.

“If we’re lucky, he won’t know this bridge is still in such good shape,” Mark growled. His calm was gone. He was now focused and intent.

“What if we’re not lucky?” I asked.

“Then we’ll see who’s chicken.”

I couldn’t see the other helicopter through the haze. But at the speed we were traveling, it couldn’t be more than thirty seconds before we’d cross paths. Or collide head-on. Mark gripped the joystick and fired a rocket. It sailed straight ahead, hitting nothing.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“I want him to know where we are.”

Our helicopter continued to drift to the left until we were lined up directly on the south tower of the bridge. It looked as if we were flying at an altitude just above the roadbed.

“Look out!” I shouted.

A rocket was incoming, shooting out of the mist. Mark easily dodged it.

“I guess he knows where we are,” he said.

“This is crazy!” I shouted. “Let’s just try to lose him.”

“We won’t, Bobby. He’ll keep coming. Then other choppers will join him. We’ve got to end it here.”

That’s when I saw it. Maybe a half mile ahead, directly in front of us. We were on a collision course with the other helicopter. Chicken time. I figured the odds were fifty-fifty.

“Shoot it!” I screamed.

Mark fired off a shot, then another. The oncoming chopper dodged them easily and fired back. Mark dipped our chopper and veered left, ducking both missiles. He then brought us back up to the same level as the enemy helicopter. On this course we would fly just over the roadbed of the bridge, inside the south tower… and crash head-on with the other chopper.

“Keep shooting!” I shouted.

“Don’t need to,” Mark said calmly.

The chopper fired another rocket. It missed us, and didn’t let off another shot. It was starting to look as if our hunter didn’t care about shooting us down anymore.

“He wants to kamikaze into us,” Mark said, reading my mind.

“That’s not how you play chicken!” I screamed. “He doesn’t know the rules.”

The oncoming chopper was about to reach the bridge.

“Mark, I can’t let you die.”

Mark smiled. “I won’t. We’ve got him.”

Huh?

I looked ahead. We were a couple of seconds away from flying head-on into this guy. In seconds we’d be wreckage. I squinted. It was going to hurt.

Suddenly the oncoming helicopter exploded in midair. One second it was bearing down on us, the next there were chunks of wreckage scattering every which way.

“Gotcha!” Mark shouted.

The doomed chopper’s rotor spun wildly off on its own. The skids flew in opposite directions. The remainder of the rockets exploded, followed by a violent eruption that had to have been the fuel tank.

Mark pulled back on the joystick, and we sailed up and over the carnage.

“Whooooo!” he yelled, totally psyched.

“What the heck happened?” I shouted.

“I told you, that bridge is pretty much intact. It’s a suspension bridge. All of the cables are still there that connect the two towers. Trouble is, you can’t see them through the haze.”

I looked back over my shoulder in time to see the shattered helicopter hit the bridge roadbed, bounce off, and plummet toward the ocean below.

“So you lured him into a spider web,” I said. “That’s why you were flying so close to the tower.” I punched him in the shoulder. “You could have told me, you know.”

“I could have, but I didn’t want to look bad if it didn’t work.”

“If it didn’t work, looking bad would have been the least of your worries. That was awesome, Mark.”

“Thank you. Now we gotta get down before they send more choppers after us.”

I sat back in my seat and tried to catch my breath. I don’t know what was more shocking: The fact that we had nearly been killed by that chopper, or that Mark Dimond was the cool pilot who set the trap and calmly sprang it, saving our lives. We flew back toward Manhattan, staying low to the water in case any other dado pilots came looking for us. I remembered the tip of Manhattan as being a place that was loaded with tall buildings. It was like a whole separate city. Not anymore. It looked as if the buildings had all been sheared off around the tenth story. It wasn’t like Rubic City on Veelox, where the city was simply crumbling from age and neglect. No, something had happened here. Something bad.

“What’s the story here?” I asked Mark, gesturing to the sad remains of a once-great city.

Mark nodded. “They didn’t officially give it a name, but they should have called it World War Three,” he said. “Except that it wasn’t about countries. It was Ravinia against the rest of the world.”

“Who won?”

“Nobody. Though I guess you could say it was Ravinia. Once it came to power, Ravinia thought it had crushed all of its opposition. But a revolt was brewing. It took centuries to grow strong enough to challenge the Ravinian authority. Up until then, if you weren’t a Ravinian, you lived in squalor. The people finally grew strong enough to fight back in numbers large enough that it scared the Ravinians. So this is how they dealt with the revolt.”

“By destroying the city?” I asked.

“Many cities. But not before moving the most valued possessions of the world to their various conclaves.”