Ragnarok

SIX

Mount Kadam, Uganda

When Knight fired the shot, Bishop felt the jolt on his shoulder where the barrel of the weapon rested. He watched as the front of the A-10’s canopy splintered apart, and the pilot’s head exploded.

There was just one problem. The plane was still coming at them; the dead pilot’s finger was still depressing the trigger on the 30 mm cannon. Bullets tore into the ground, chewing a speeding path right to where Bishop stood with his muscular legs parted.

“Move!” Bishop was shouting and flying through the air to the right as Knight was already leaping to their left. The small Korean rolled in the tall grass and disappeared from Bishop’s sight as the gunfire raced past them. Bishop checked the sky to see that the trouble had not passed. The gunfire from the cannon had ripped past them through the tall grasses of the field, but the plane was crashing down toward their location now, and they were taking fire from the locals, who had closed the distance while Bishop and Knight had been distracted by the arrival of the A-10.

Before either man could move, one of the planes wing’s sheared off in a shower of sparks created by a barrage of bullets raining down from a second aircraft high above. Lacking lift provided by the wing, the plane nose-dived and spun to Earth, the freed wing crashing nearby, and each portion of the ruined vehicle exploding on impact.

Silhouetted by the rising plume of burning airplane fuel, Knight picked off the last few targets downfield as their rescuer, the curved-wing transport ship known as the Crescent, swept past directly overhead.

The Chess Team transport plane arced gracefully and came back toward Bishop’s position as he stood and watched. It kicked in its vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) thrusters, and slowed to a hover near Bishop. The craft then began to set down in the tall grass. The noise from its engines sounded low, like a hum, and the thrust of air was no stronger than a rough breeze.

The Crescent was Chess Team’s stealth troop transport. Its half-moon shape could hold several tons of equipment, but the team more frequently used the vehicle for fast and quiet troop transport. It had recently been retrofitted for the VTOL engines, because no airports near the team’s headquarters in New Hampshire had a long enough runway for it. The interior was fitted with quarters for 60 men on bunks, as well as the latest in tactical weaponry. Radar-absorbent black and gray material coated the entire vehicle, and the surface of the flying wing consisted of odd, lumpy rectangular shapes. The plane had top-notch electronic countermeasures and held a wide array of armaments for any occasion-including its own heavy rotary cannon, which had just dispatched the falling Warthog.

Bishop turned back to see a few figures fleeing in the distance and Knight casually strolling toward him, carrying his massive sniper rifle over a shoulder.

“I guess there’s not much left for me to do.” Bishop told him.

“Something tells me there’ll be plenty for you to do in Cairo.” Knight walked up to the lowered entrance ramp leading inside the stealth vehicle and Bishop followed, lugging the olive drab XM312-B.

Inside they greeted the pilots, former Nightstalkers men they knew only by their callsigns: Black One and Black Two. They strapped into chairs, waiting for the landing ramp to close, and the interior of the plane to pressurize, before contacting Deep Blue.

“We’re on board the Crescent,” Knight spoke into a microphone. “What’s going on in Cairo?”

Deep Blue’s face appeared on a monitor in front of Bish- op’s chair. His rugged good looks, crow’s feet, and balding hair reminded Bishop of Bruce Willis. “Forget Cairo. I’m sending you to the Asian theater now. It’s bad this time, gentlemen. It is very, very bad. Sending you some files right now. Read up. And if you aren’t strapped in tightly, do so. I’m ordering Black One to get you to China at the Crescent ’s top speed. Deep Blue out.”

Knight looked at Bishop with a raised eyebrow. Then Bishop felt the thrust when the vehicle sped up and broke the sound barrier. The computer terminal beeped in front of them, and the screen came to life with satellite imagery and video files in separate windows. The scenes of destruction and devastation were nearly incomprehensible.

The worst part was that each window was labeled with a different city name: Karachi, Philadelphia, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Cairo, Los Angeles, Brisbane, New Delhi and Buenos Aires. The world was on fire.