David Robbins - Citadel Run

Specifically, a jet fighter.

The jet streaked in low over Floyd Lake, zooming over the convoy vehicles parked near the southwestern shore. It rolled and banked to the west.

“What the blazes is that thing?” Hickok shouted.

“A jet!” Blade replied, glancing along the shore. With a start he realized how vulnerable they were; the troop transports, jeep, and the SEAL were sitting ducks, right out in the open, and the majority of the people were standing near the lake or, in the case of many of the children and a few of the adults, actually in Floyd Lake, swimming and splashing. Right at the moment, though, everybody was staring at the jet in wonder.

“Here it comes again!” Geronimo yelled.

“Get out of the water!” Blade cried. “Take cover!”

There wasn’t enough time.

The jet swooped down out of the western sky, its guns blazing. Dozens of the refugees were mowed down where they stood. In a twinkling, the jet was gone again, banking for another strafing run.

Screaming in stark panic, the refugees were streaming toward a wooden section close to the lake.

“We’ve got to get the trucks out of here!” Geronimo said.

“Too late!” Zahner declared, pointing.

They all dove for the dirt as the jet angled in. This time the pilot zeroed in on the troop transports, the jet’s guns booming, and as the jet flashed off to the right one of the trucks exploded, showering debris in every direction. Fortunately, none of the other vehicles were close enough to be caught in the blast.

“Follow me!” Blade commanded, and sprinted to the SEAL. He climbed inside, in the driver’s seat, and studied the four toggle switches in the center of the dashboard, the armament switches.

Hickok, Geronimo, Zahner, and Bertha piled in after Blade, with Hickok taking the other bucket seat and Geronimo, Zahner, and Bertha filling the back seat.

“What do you have in mind, pard?” Hickok queried.

Before Blade could respond, the jet was on them again. This time the pilot was aiming at the SEAL, and the five inside could feel the vehicle shake from the onslaught of the jet’s guns. The SEAL’s impervious plastic body, unlike the troop transports, was able to withstand the blistering attack.

Blade was trying to recall everything he could about the second of the four toggle switches, the one controlling the surface-to-air missile. The missile was mounted in the roof above the driver’s seat. If he activated the switch, a panel in the roof would slide aside and the surface-to-air missile, a heat-seeking Stinger, would be launched. The Stinger, so said the instructions, had an effective range of ten miles.

“It’s comin’ again!” Bertha declared.

Blade rested his right hand on the toggle switch. Knowing the details of the Operations Manual was well and good, but the fact still remained that they had never tested the weapon and they had no idea if it would work as designed.

“Go for it!” Hickok urged.

Blade looked out his window and saw the jet bearing down from the west as before, coming out of the sun. Was the jet armed with missiles or rockets, as well as machine guns? If so, the SEAL would not survive a direct hit. There might be time to take cover! He started the engine and gunned it, the SEAL lurching forward as the jet passed overhead. The movement of the SEAL evidently disconcerted the pilot of the aircraft, because the devastating fire failed to materialize.

“Geronimo, keep your eyes on the jet,” Blade ordered. “Cue me when it’s about a mile off.”

“Will do.”

Blade drove the SEAL due north, putting distance between the SEAL and the remainder of the convoy, seeking a suitable spot where they could take cover.

“It’s made a wide turn,” Geronimo reported.

Blade saw a gully to his left, a wide one at the top of a rise, and he drove toward it.

“He’s coming in fast,” Geronimo announced, “about five miles out.”

Blade had the pedal to the metal.

“Four miles.”

The SEAL’s colossal tires churned up the small rise.

“Three miles.”

Blade wheeled the SEAL into the gully and slammed on the brakes.

“Two miles.”

Blade gripped the toggle switch in his right hand.

“One mile,” Geronimo stated.

“Now!” Hickok shouted.

Blade flicked the toggle switch, even as the jet roared overhead, not more than fifty feet above the SEAL. There was a tremendous explosion as something struck the gully above the SEAL. A shower of dirt and stones descended on the vehicle as a cloud of dust choked the air.

So!

The jet did carry more than machine guns!

But what about the surface-to-air missile?

“Nothing happened,” Geronimo said.

That was when the entire SEAL bucked backwards and there was a loud retort from the roof.

Blade leaned over the steering wheel and spotted the small surface-to-air missile, the Stinger, in flight, arching upward into the bright blue sky on the trail of the jet. He threw his door open and jumped to the ground for a better view, followed by the others.

The pilot of the jet apparently knew the Stinger was after him. The jet was climbing as rapidly as the pilot could manage, gaining distance on the pursuing missile.

“The Stinger only has a ten-mile range,” Geronimo noted anxiously. “If the jet can outrun it…” He left the sentence unfinished.

Blade was marveling at the supreme skill the pilot was displaying in his endeavor to avoid the missile.

The jet abruptly banked westward and the Stinger closed in and would have made contact with its target, but at the last possible instant the pilot rolled the jet and the missile passed under the aircraft. The pilot dived in a shrieking whine of the craft’s engines, nosing the jet as steeply as feasible.

What was the pilot up to now?

The Stinger had turned and was soaring after the jet.

With consummate expertise, the pilot pulled the jet out of the dive just when it seemed the aircraft would crash into the ground.

The Stinger, close behind the jet, was slower to respond. Its sensors registered the jet arcing up and away and the guidance system compensated, the missile clearing a stand of pine trees with only feet to spare.

At full throttle, the pilot was fleeing in a vertical ascent. The Stinger was losing ground rapidly.

“He’s doing it!” Geronimo said in alarm.

Blade glanced at the SEAL, wondering how they would escape if the jet returned to finish the job it had started. There was an unusual sound high up in the sky and he gazed up at the dogfight.

The jet was in serious trouble; it was making a coughing noise and depositing a trail of black smoke. It seemed to stall completely and hang in the air for several seconds.

The Stinger was eating up the space between them.

“Look!” Bertha cried.

The canopy of the jet suddenly fell away from the aircraft, and they could see a diminutive figure scrambling from the cockpit.

“Go!” Zahner yelled. “Get the hell out of there!”

Blade found himself doing the same thing, mentally rooting for the pilot to evade his impending fate. The man—or was it a woman?—had put up such a stupendous struggle, he or she deserved to live.

The Stinger, however, being artificial in construction and intelligence, was immune to the emotional pangs of compassion or a salute to bravery; it functioned according to a singular, preprogrammed purpose, and it fulfilled that purpose now.

The tiny form of the pilot was in the act of leaping clear of the jet when the Stinger hit. The blast of the impact utterly destroyed the aircraft in a sparkling, fiery cloud of annihilation.

“Back in the SEAL,” Blade immediately instructed them. He waited until they were inside, watching the wreckage of the jet plummet to the ground perhaps four miles to the west.