Don Pendleton - Line Of Honor

“You want me to turn belly-up, as well?”

“No! But let’s lose the ordnance!”

“Right!”

Grimaldi flipped a switch and the explosive bolts holding the M-134 on its mounts snapped like firecrackers. He tipped Dragonslayer just slightly to be helpful, and Bolan shoved the minigun out the door. The soldier hoped the enemy pilot was paying attention. Grimaldi held Dragonslayer steady at six hundred feet and 150 miles per hour. Bolan leaned back in his straps and lodged himself behind the cabin door frame. He reached back and slid his hand around the grips of his grenade launcher.

Bolan waited for the Russian 30 mm gun to blow him and Grimaldi to hell.

Even over the thunder of Dragonslayer’s rotors he heard the roar of the twin jet engines. The Frogfoot attack fighter pulled up alongside Dragonslayer like a traffic cop pulling over a vehicular offender. Morning light continued to spill over the mountains, and Bolan could see the Su-25 pilot pointing at Grimaldi and then pointing down at the ground.

The Stony Man pilot was waving back and grinning in a friendly fashion.

Bolan swung out on his straps. The M-32 Multiple Grenade Launcher was a 6-shot weapon. The soldier put the reflex sight slightly in front of the Su-25’s port-side air intake and fired. The fragmentation grenade hit the Su-25 wing about six feet back and detonated harmlessly. Bolan dragged his sights forward to increase his lead and fired again. His second frag grenade detonated against the pilot’s armored cockpit glass. Its only effect was to make the man nearly jump out of his seat. Bolan split the distance as the pilot yanked on his stick and fired the launcher four times in rapid succession. The soldier had front-loaded the M-32 with four frag grenades followed by an antiarmor round and white phosphorus.

The third frag missed.

His fourth bomb, the antiarmor and the incendiary grenades arced in the flight and were sucked up by the turbojet one-two-three like golf balls being eaten by a wet-dry vacuum. The Su-25 pilot had the unwitting decency to dive for the deck and take Dragonslayer out of collateral-damage range. Bolan had seen more explosions in his life than most men had had hot dinners. His eyebrows rose slightly as the Frogfoot shot a fifty-yard tongue of white fire from its port-engine nacelle.

Seconds later the Sukhoi disappeared as 3,000 liters of jet fuel came into violent contact with superheated gas, molten metal and a cloud of burning white phosphorus expanding in her belly to fill every internal crevice. Bolan watched as a ball of orange fire and white-and-black smoke fell from the sky like a slow-motion meteor. Bits of jetfighter with less drag fell from the fiery mass in little smoldering black streamers.

“Gosh…” Grimaldi observed. “Nice shot.”

“Thanks.” Bolan leaned back in his strap, broke open the smoking grenade launcher and reloaded. “I don’t suppose we have a fix on our target anymore.”

“No.” Grimaldi sighed. “We lost our window. We’re going to have to wait until target reestablishes contact.”

Bolan snapped his weapon shut on a loaded round. Odds were they weren’t going to get too many more chances. “Take us home.”

“Copy that.”

The Executioner glanced backward and watched the molten mess that had once been an airplane become a smoking hole in the dust of the Sudan.

All of this begged the question of just how exactly two Su-25s had gotten the jump on them. The Sudanese air-defense grid wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art. Grimaldi had flown them in out of Uganda well under their 1980s vintage Soviet radars. For that matter, Dragonslayer had the most sophisticated electronics suite of any helicopter in existence. If the Sudan had been hammering the sky with their radar, Grimaldi would have known it. They hadn’t detected anything until the Su-25 duo had suddenly swooped out of nowhere. Bolan and Grimaldi had been caught flatfooted. There was really only one explanation and it wasn’t a happy one.

Someone had tipped off the authorities.

Lokichogio Airport, Lokichogio, Kenya

GRIMALDI WAS INCENSED. “Okay, someone tattled!”

Bolan pulled a sweating brown bottle of Tusker lager out of the ice chest and wiped it across his own sweating brow. The U.S. Military General Purpose Tent didn’t have climate control. He cracked the bottle and shrugged. “Wasn’t me.”

“Somebody did.”

“You checked her for bugs?”

The pilot scowled. He had gone over every inch of the aircraft before takeoff and triple checked after the Sudanese dogfight debacle. “Nah, you’re right, I should have thought of that.”

Bolan tapped the sat-phone icon on his tablet. He had already given Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman a debriefing and was hoping for some follow-up.

“Bear, what have you got for me?”

Kurtzman came on the line instantly from the Computer Room at Stony Man Farm, Virginia. “Not much. That was a very interesting story you told me. I’d have to say the most interesting development is that there have been no new developments.”

“No reaction from the Sudanese?”

“Not a peep. Nothing about unauthorized incursions into their airspace, much less any fuss about losing two of their attack fighters.”

“So the question is, who knew about us?”

“Someone tattled!” Grimaldi muttered.

Kurtzman had clearly heard the pilot. “Striker, unless you think Farm security has been compromised, I’m putting tattling on the low-order-of-probability list.”

“Then we were spotted, raised red flags, and someone put the tell-tale on us,” Grimaldi stated.

“That’s the way I see it, too, but I’m finding it kind of hard to fathom. Did you check Dragonslayer for bugs?”

Grimaldi reddened. You didn’t see the man lose his cool very often. However, the Stony Man pilot was nearly always the ambusher rather than the ambushee. He had flown into suicidal situations and threaded the eye of the needle more times than Bolan could count. Getting ghosted and jumped out of the blue, or in this case the black, was an infrequent and unwelcome experience. Grimaldi glared at Bolan and raised his hands heavenward.

“Copy that, Bear,” Bolan acknowledged.

“Then let’s break it down. Who would have noticed you?”

Bolan grabbed his tablet and his beer, and stepped outside the tent. Grimaldi followed. Lokichogio Airport was a small facility and also extremely busy. It had become a hub for international and private aid and mercy missions in heartbreaking numbers. A small city of tents, container-unit shelters and prefabs littered the grounds around the main airport. Bolan and Grimaldi were posing as a private courier operation for a Farm-fabricated nongovernmental organization, or NGO. The tent they had brought with them. Dragonslayer’s landing pad was a mostly level square of ground that someone had packed down with a lawn roller. Amenities were few. Bolan wanted to stay out of town, but the ad hoc city of aid workers was serviced morning, noon and night by roach coaches and street hawkers of all descriptions.

The fact was, between the humanitarian crises in the Congo, South Sudan, Darfur, as well as Ethiopia and Somalia, dozens of nations and NGOs were in a constant flux of representation. With that many interests, and that much money and aid flying in from all over the world and flying out in all directions, the city had also become a hotbed of smuggling and international intrigue. Kurtzman was right. Bolan’s two-man team and Dragonslayer had attracted attention. They had barely been in Kenya more than forty-eight hours and had hoped to be out in the morning, long before any interest they attracted could materialize into anything.

The next question was how had they been tracked.

Anyone stupid enough to walk up to Dragonslayer to try to put a GPS tracking device on her would have set off her security suite, incurring Bolan’s and Grimaldi’s immediate wrath. Assuming someone with ninja-quality skills had succeeded, Grimaldi’s pre- and postflight electronic security sweeps would have detected any invading electronic device.