The Black Knight

XVII

‘They’re airborne!’

General Veer heard the cry go up as he sheltered behind an icy outcrop from the ice glider’s gunfire blasting the ridge line. He peered around the edge of the outcrop as the gunfire ceased and saw the gliders soaring into the air on explosively deployed chutes, turning the gliders into armed paragliders.

‘Get to the vehicles!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t let them get ahead of us! Shoot them down!’

The soldiers broke away from the ridge as the paragliders climbed out of rifle range, the sunlight glowing through their gracefully arced parachutes as they eclipsed the sun, their shadows racing over Veer’s position. He looked out to the south and saw four smoking piles of wreckage burning on the ice fields.

‘Ten men to the south!’ he roared. ‘Get out there on the ice and take any prisoners you can find alive!’

Veer whirled as several of his men split away and began sprinting toward the debris field, their rifles held before them. He ran across the ice, his boots gripping the surface easily as the metal studs dug in and looked up to see the paragliders passing overhead, their engines humming distantly as they continued to climb. The leading machine suddenly tilted its nose down and Veer bellowed a warning.

‘Incoming!’

The glider’s nose lit up as two small-calibre machine guns blasted the ice sheet, the bullets pursuing Veer’s men as they sprinted for their own vehicles. Veer ducked down and threw himself toward the glider, making it harder for the pilot to nose down and track him at such low altitude, and the bullet streams passed by him as he hit the unforgiving ice.

Veer turned and saw several of his men hit by the hail of gunfire that hammered into them from above with dull thumps, their bodies tumbling awkwardly down as the glider ceased fire and raced by overhead. Four more followed it, their bullets slicing into Veer’s troops before they pulled up again into a zoom climb away from the ridge.

Veer took aim with his rifle and fired half a dozen shots at the receding gliders, but saw no impacts as he scrambled to his feet.

Veer cursed as he ran, saw ahead his men hurrying to where the All Terrain Vehicles they had brought with them had landed. They were hauling off the parachutes that were draped across the vehicles, all ten of which were specially adapted for cold weather environments: fitted with enclosed cockpits and armed with an M2HB fifty calibre machine gun, they were slower than the ski gliders but infinitely more durable.

‘Get those guns into play, now!’ Veer shrieked as he reached the vehicles, the soldiers scrambling to start their engines.

He looked up and saw the gliders sailing high overhead, each travelling at perhaps forty knots. Veer jumped onto the back of the nearest ATV and grabbed at the machine gun, pulling the locking pins out as he turned the weapon and aimed it up into the frigid blue sky at the nearest of the gliders and squeezed the trigger.

The deafening clatter of the machine gun split the air as it began spitting used shell casings out onto the pristine ice.

‘Jesus!’

Ethan heard Riggs shout in alarm as beside them a stream of gunfire ripped through the formation. Ethan looked left as a sharp crack caught his attention and one of the glider’s engines spilled a plume of black smoke and began to descend rapidly toward the ice below.

‘We’re hit!’ Hannah shouted over the radio.

Ethan felt his guts convulse as he watched the glider go down.

‘We need to go after them!’ he shouted.

Riggs’ reply was without compromise.

‘Our objective is the site of the crash. We go forward.’

‘And just how do we get back if there’s nobody left to carry the damned artefact out of there?!’ Ethan shouted. ‘At this rate, you’ll be the only man left!’

Ethan heard Riggs curse as he called out a fresh command.

‘All call signs, hit them while they’re in their vehicles! Cover the damaged glider!’

Ethan grabbed the manoeuvring handle to steady himself in his seat as the glider wheeled about in mid-air, Riggs turning steeply as he swung around and began lining up for a fresh pass at the troops streaming toward the recently landed ATVs.

Ethan could see a large calibre machine gun firing up at the gliders passing overhead, and then his vision jarred as Riggs opened fire once more and sent bullets spraying into the packed soldiers as they tried to get their vehicles into motion.

Riggs pulled up and away from the target and Ethan heard a whump-whump sound of impacts as the ATV’s large calibre machine gun pumped rounds into the air. The glider shuddered and the canopy shattered as a bullet shot up through the floor of the cockpit and smashed its way out through the Perspex canopy.

Riggs swore as he saw the canopy above them tear open, a ragged gap appearing in the center as he pulled through a hard turn to escape the onslaught.

‘That’s going to cost us!’ he shouted back at Ethan.

Ethan looked over his shoulder as they continued around the turn and saw several of the gliders make daring passes over the ATVs far below, gunfire raking their enemy. He could see bodies lying on the snow, gunfire billowing up toward them as the soldiers abandoned their attempts to board the vehicles and opened fire with their rifles.

Ethan looked to his left and saw the smoke trail of the damaged glider fleeing to the north, almost down on the ice now as its pilot attempted to land.

‘There!’ Ethan said. ‘They’re down!’

Riggs looked left and saw the glider thump down onto the ice a half mile away.

‘All gliders pull out and turn north!’

The gliders pulled up from the ATVs and turned away, several of them with ripped parachute canopies and trailing feint lines of grey smoke from minor damage to their engines. Ethan watched as he saw the MJ-12 soldiers again board their vehicles and start the engines to pursue the gliders, then turned and looked ahead as he saw Hannah’s glider bumping along the ice far below.

‘There won’t be enough time to get them back in the air,’ Riggs insisted, ‘and we don’t have enough seats to get them into the other gliders. There’s nothing we can do.’

Ethan’s mind raced as he sought some way of preventing Hannah and her pilot from being captured or killed by Majestic Twelve’s mercenaries. He watched as Hannah’s glider slid to a halt and its parachute billowed uselessly in the Antarctic winds, tucked in close to the glider where the pilot had drawn it in to prevent the winds from hauling the glider backwards and out of control across the ice.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ he replied. ‘Land us to the north of them, as close as you can get.’

He could almost feel the scowl developing on Riggs’s face as they began to descend toward the crippled glider.

‘I have a bad feeling about this.’

‘Get out, now!’

Hannah Ford punched the buckles of her harness and scrambled from the warmth of the glider’s cockpit and out into the frigid cold, her legs slightly numb after the continuous vibrations inside the craft as her Navy SEAL pilot jumped out and cocked his rifle. Going by the name of Del Toro, the chunky Latino soldier had already revealed himself to be something of an emotionless automaton driven only by the need for the mission to succeed.

Hannah looked up and saw a handful of smoky clouds on the horizon as the vehicles she had seen on the ground began making their way toward the crippled glider. High above, she saw their colleagues sail overhead and continue on toward the north.

‘This is only going to go one way,’ Del Toro snapped at her, ‘and it doesn’t involve us escaping. But we can take down as many of them as possible before they over run us.’

Hannah blinked. ‘It’s your positivity that I admire.’

‘The engine’s shot and we’re outnumbered,’ the soldier growled. ‘Our team won’t come for us, it’s not part of our mission. Do you want to be captured, tortured, raped and murdered, or would you rather shoot a few of these assholes before they get to us?

Hannah scowled and pulled out her 9mm pistol.

‘I thought you Special Forces guys could out-fight entire armies, conquer countries and stuff?’

Del Toro smiled grimly.

‘Don’t believe everything you see on television. Special Forces teams are trained to go in quietly, create havoc and leave without ever being seen. We’re not typically well equipped for open battle against numerically superior forces.’

Hannah was about to reply when a sudden clatter of gunfire erupted from the south and bullets hammered the ice around her. She turned and hurled herself into the meagre cover provided by the crippled glider as the bullets smashed into the hull, Del Toro throwing himself down alongside her and aiming his rifle and the onrushing enemy.

‘This is where the fun begins,’ he said with a tight smile as he took aim.

The large calibre weapon firing at them had a much greater range than the soldier’s M-16 rifle, and Del Toro did not fire for what felt like an age as Hannah kept her head down and listened to the sound of bullets peppering the glider’s hull and impacting the thick ice below it.

‘We’re going to get pulverized here!’ she shouted above the gunfire, now able to hear the sound of the vehicle’s engines boring down upon them.

The SEAL did not reply, aiming carefully. He had propped the M-16 onto its tripod, the barrel arced high up into the sky as he switched to the underslung 203 grenade launcher and held his breath for a brief moment before firing.

The grenade popped out with a thump and rocketed out across the ice plains. Hannah watched it until it was too small to see, and then she saw it thump down in front of the onrushing ATVs.

The grenade detonated, a distant blast of shrapnel and flame that burst directly in front of the ATV. The vehicle shuddered and swerved and she could see that its windscreen had been shattered, but it kept coming.

‘The grenade didn’t kill them,’ she said.

‘It wasn’t supposed to,’ the SEAL replied quietly from over his rifle’s sights. ‘I wanted that glass out of the way.’

A moment later he fired two shots in rapid succession and Hannah saw the ATV swerve again, the tiny distant form of the driver slumped over his controls as the vehicle slowed to a halt on the ice.

‘Good shot,’ she murmured.

‘It’s only delaying the inevitable,’ he snapped back. ‘You wanna start shooting that thing or are you gonna use it as a peace offering?’

Hannah scowled and fired off a couple of shots at the stricken ATV as its passenger tried to remove his dead driver from his seat and take the controls. The shots forced the passenger to shield behind the vehicle, taking him out of the race.

The SEAL fired again, a grenade slamming into a second ATV and this time he got lucky, the blast tearing apart the vehicle’s tracks and sending it spiralling out of control to the right.

‘Two down,’ the SEAL said grimly, ‘ten to go.’

Hannah looked up and saw the gliders sailing overhead, ignoring their plight as they continued on toward the north.

‘See?’ Del Toro chortled almost gleefully. ‘They’re not coming down here for us.’

One of the glider’s engines in the sky above suddenly changed note, and she looked up to see it descend from the formation as it passed overhead, changing direction and aiming for them. She could not prevent the smile that curled from the corner of her lips as she realized without a doubt that Warner was on board.

‘You’re forgetting,’ she said, ‘that not everybody up there is a Navy SEAL.’

Del Toro did not reply, firing again and sending grenades arcing across the ice to explode close to the ATVs closing in on them. Hannah heard the roar of the glider’s engine as it soared down over the ice and then its skis rasped as it touched down, slowing dramatically as the power was reduced. She fired two shots and looked over her shoulder to see the craft turn on the ice and hurry toward them.

‘See?’ she said. ‘They’ve come for us.’

‘It won’t do any damned good!’ Del Toro shot back. ‘There’s four of us and only two seats!’