Chapter Four- Part One
Irvine left himself fall into a sniper's watchfulness as they watched the plane taxi down the runway, a plume of orange dust swirling behind it. He followed it automatically with the autocannon's gun sights. The mercenaries hadn't stinted themselves- their aircraft was a decommissioned Estharian sonic plane, the toy of flashy rich types with big entourages. Or in this case, a jet that could transport a seventy-two strong unit at three times the speed of sound and still pass for civilian. With its hooked nose cone and sleek outline it looked like a mechanical raptor, an eagle of the skies. The aging, tubby CC-780 Dollet cargo plane parked for easy take-off looked like a beached whale in comparison.
His ear pin vibrated insistently; someone from the Situation room was trying to reach him. The hijacked plane was coasting to a stop at the end of its runway, parallel with the CC-780 at the start of its. Only a few hundred yards separated the two planes. Irvine reached up and squashed the little device deeper into his ear, then rubbed at his aching eyes. After this was all over he was going to sleep somewhere well away from the sun's glare.
"Yes?"
"-olice Commissioner Bashtor calling Colonel Irvine. Can you hear me Colonel?" Gabon's breathy field commander bellowed in his ear, using Irvine's temporary contract-rank. He sounded like a man who'd been doing a lot of fast talking.
"Receiving you loud and clear Commissioner,"
"Major Merton has just been in contact about your buggy squads. He wasn't happy."
Irvine ran a hand through his hair to burn off some nervous energy. The gunner's seating in the buggy was too tight, cramping him. Had Bashtor offered something stupid to settle the rattled hijacker's leader?
"He can hardly have expected an empty airport," he snapped.
"That's what I told him," Bashtor said impatiently "He didn't like that either. We had quite a fight going. He says he's sending a section out to check the plane, and they're taking their pilots out with them. The rest of the hostages stay on the jet."
"Thank you, Commissioner," Irvine said, trying to sound grateful, not surprised. Friction with Gabon's lieutenants had been going on since he'd pushed them out of ground operations after the interception debacle. He'd expected a last minute lecture.
"I thought you should know the situation," the policeman answered him stiffly, "Are your people ready?"
Irvine glanced down at his wrist-comp, plugged into the hostage-rescue teams' field communications system. All sections had called in and were on stand-by, just as they'd been for the last half-hour.
"Yes Commissioner,"
Then good luck, Mr Kinneas. Bashtor out,"
Irvine nodded automatically, and then realized that Bashtor wasn't speaking by vid and couldn't have seen the gesture. The Centran driver did though, and gave a curt nod back as he released the buggy's clutch. The sound of the squadron's engines rose from a quiet hum to a hard growl.
Selphie stared at the omnithopter's sensor panel over the head of the co-pilot, and thumbed her wrist-comp. Here, up above the cloud-cover, it was hard to picture what was happening below on the tiny airfield. The human mind had a hard time with the scale that their machine's sensors had to cover. Irvine's face appeared on-screen quickly enough though, his image looking intense.
"Hey. What you got?"
"We've got two MOIs moving on the IR scanner," she told him crisply, "The Situation people are getting the same from the feed off the backscatter van. There's a group of eight moving into the pilot's cabin and a dozen more moving to the exit by the nose. We think that'll be the scouting section."
"And the others are the stewards and guards," he said, catching up with her "They're locking them in there…"
"With those anti-intruder doors it's the most secure place on the plane," she agreed. Movement on the image screen caught her eye, "Hang on. The air chutes have just come down. The scouts are coming out. What about the stewards Cowboy?"
"You'll have to make a Thunder run to get them," he said sourly.
"Hey, lucky us," she smiled at his distracted image, "I thought I'd have to do something hard."
She saw his face change on the screen, becoming Irvine, not 'Colonel Kinneas', for a split second.
"Sel-"
"What?"
He hesitated, caught between screens, then distracted himself long enough from the action in front of him to meet her eyes and flash a tired grin.
"Don't do anything stupid will you?"
"Look," she told him exasperatedly "It'll be fine. You had us practice this like, forever. Just you worry about yourself. And for Hyne's sake do something about that hair."
She blew him a deft kiss
as his image reached a startled hand up to his head, and cut the
link. She waved the descent signal to the waiting pilot, then slid
through the cockpit hatch to get herself webbed in with the rest of
her triad. Beneath her
the floor of the omnithopter tilted as the
machine began its attack run.
"Thunder run," Selphie muttered to no one in particular as she settled by the left-side bay doors "Whoopy-doo. Oh yes indeedy."
Irvine and the buggy squadron sat and watched as the first hijackers disembarked. They'd blown all six slides simultaneously, giving the mercenaries in the plane wide fields of fire. Six armored figures had slid down the chute nearest the white jet's nose, and fanned out around its base. They were followed by two hunched men in grey flightsuits, the hijacked plane's unlucky pilots. They were each grabbed unceremoniously by the mercenary nearest them and shoved into the middle of the hijackers' box formation. Behind the men the last two triads came smoothly out.
Trapped in the centre of a staggered quadrangle, the pilots were marched at sword-point towards the waiting CC-880. The Galbadians watched the two lines of buggies spread out in front of the hangers nervously. Their rear triad glared back at the hijacked jet. Poised above them, unnoticed and ignored, two little black dots appeared in the sky and began to drop towards the airstrip.
"Things are going to go noisy," Irvine muttered to himself. He cleared his throat and issued a general address through his wrist-comp; "Okay everyone, this is it. Flight A2 is coming in hard. Everyone wait for their pass, and follow your selected targets. Await my order: Wait… wait…"
The Centran pilot sent his machine into a steep drop before starting the last leg of the attack run. The deck titled sharply underfoot and Selphie felt her last meal being pulled unpleasantly towards the 'thoper's nose. She gripped her restraints more tightly and tried to ignore the feeling that her stomach had dropped several yards beneath her feet. She could hear Sakia's teeth rattling next to her with the judders of the small craft's vibrations as it plunged towards the ground, but the little SeeD stared stoically in front of her. Denjac, the third member of the triad, was strapped by the bay doors right where the whistle of the turbulence was loudest. He had a light covering of sweat trickling down his chiselled face.
The omnithopter banked right as the pilot corrected his approach and led the pass over the airstrip. They came in fast, flattening out from their steep curve just above the start of the strip. Denjac came out with a stream of oaths, and even Sakia's face looked white at how fine the pilot had cut it. Denjac reached up and hit the release switch for the bay door, then pulled himself into his post. Sakia staggered after him as the wind tore and plucked at the SeeDs, and the tarmac whipped by underneath them. Clinging onto a hand-strap each, the two framed the open door and checked their weapons. Sakia had a broad bladed bio-knife in an arm sheath, while Denjac trailed a bulky gunblade from his right hand. Somehow you could tell he was from Galbadia Garden.
Selphie had already unsheathed Strange Vision and unwound the chains, feeling the weight of the metal links as they rattled together. Her blood had begun to pound with the falling hum of the engines and the thought of what came next. There was something about mortal danger that made her feel more alive. For a short time she would experience sensation more intense then any drug, and afterwards she would be giddy at life. It struck her, as she loosed her restraints, that safe people would find that view crazy. The thought of trying to explain it across the gulf of experience between her and most of the world struck her as so absurd she just laughed out loud.
Denjac gave her an unnerved glance, and then turned to give a meaningful look to Sakia. But the little blonde SeeD was staring out the bay doors and pointing. Armoured figures were scattering away from their approach, weapons firing wildly. They were about to run the length of the white jet.
The Galbadian scouts crossed the space between the two planes at a quick trot, keeping a wary eye on the buggy squadrons stationed near either end of the CC-880. They'd also noticed the hangars behind the transport plane, Irvine thought. The mercenaries had kept their pilot hostages boxed between all four triads, at the middle of a loose-diamond shaped formation. One triad at its tip had acted as point-men, another directly behind the pilots as the rearguard. Now, as they reached the plane, the flankers fanned out, grabbing what cover they could behind the wheels and passenger steps. The point-men stormed up the steps and burst into the empty plane, gunblades cocked. The pilots were left milling about uncertainly at the bottom the stairs, too important for the hijackers' to allow them to board just yet.
All the same, the rearguard ostensibly ignored them; crouching on the tarmac instead and watching their route back to the safety of the white plane. Irvine had been tensed for a cry of rage from the pilotless CC-880, perhaps when the Galbadians' point-men found the smashed control panels. But the mercenaries were better then he'd thought. It was a man from the rear-guard triad who sprang to his feet incredulously, jabbing his gunblade at Selphie's flight.
He turned, probably trying to take one of the pilots as a shield. Instead his body flopped about like a hooked fish on a line, as it was punched through with the heavy autocannon rounds Irvine aimed at him. All around, Irvine was vaguely aware of the ambush erupting as he shouted the attack order over the com-net. The important thing was not to think too hard about it. In a minute the problems would come flooding in, but for now he had a window to throw off his lethargy. He used it, fixing his mind to the sights of the swerving buggy as he tracked a second running figure.
The Centran broke his de-acceleration run over the hijacker's plane. The omnithopter spun into a sickening ribbon loop, a 180ْ nose-to-tail that killed what was left of their velocity from the propulsion engines. Selphie's ears caught the change in engine pitch just before the pilot threw his machine into the descending spiral.
"BRACE!" she yelled, grabbing for the seat she'd just stood up from. The others jammed themselves in just in time, the tail of the omnithopter started swinging round like a pilotless ship rudder a heartbeat later. Sakia's feet actually left the deck as she was lifted up from her handgrips in the direction of the open bay doors. She kicked out hard with one foot and pushed herself away with the 'thopter wall. It spun the little SeeD around to face the wall, but using her momentum she managed to catch her seat with an arm and a leg. She clamped herself to it like Selphie, who heard a stream of curses coming out of the blonde woman's mouth. Denjac looked at Selphie; his face grimaced in effort, but his flecked-brown eyes huge with a kind of wondering.
"What's he doing! Is this psycho trying to kill us!" he screamed at her. Selphie tried to shake her head at that, but had to stop to concentrate on clinging to her chair until her head caught up with her body. Just when she thought she was going to lose her grip entirely the spinning stopped. The jump-jets came on with a roar that rattled the deck-plates. Selphie let herself go limp a little with relief. That had been a little too intense, even for her. Denjac still had a death-grip on his handstrap. His knuckles were white under his tan, and so was his face.
"We're over the nose Ma'am," he said a little unsteadily.
