Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗
"Get out," he yelled4 at Sarah, and she jumped down and ran to the aircraft. 4;ally-Anne grabbed her arm and helped her swing up and tumble into the back seat.
On the cab, Tungata fired a last burst with the heavy machine-gun.
The first three par as were down, their green parachutes rolling softly in front of the light breeze, and Tungata's bullets kicked dust amongst them. Craig saw one of the par as fall and drag away loose and lifeless on his shrouds. Craig grabbed the AK 47 and the bag of spare ammunition and shouted, "Let's go, Sam. Let's go!" They ran to the Cessna, and Tungata, weak and sick, fell at the steps, and Craig had to drag him to his feet and shove him up.
Sally-Anne let go d-te brakes before Tungata was aboard, and Craig ran beside the Cessna as it gathered speed.
Tungata fell into the back seat beside Sarah, and Craig jumped up and got a hold. Though he was hampered by the AK rifle and bag, he dragged himself into the front seat beside Sally-Anne.
"Get the door closed!" Sally' Anne screamed, without looking at him, all her attention on the strip ahead. The dangling seat-belt was jammed in the door and Craig wrestled with it as they built up to rotation speed. Craig managed to extricate the strap and slam the door closed.
When he looked up, he saw paratroopers sprinting forward from the edge of the strip to intercept the Cessna.
It did not need the shiny general's star on the front of his helmet to identify Peter Fungabera. The set of his shoulders, the way he carried his head, and the fluid catlike grace of his run were all distinctive. His men were spread out be hind him they were almost directly ahead of the Cessna, only four or five hundred paces ahead.
Sally-Anne rotated and the Cessna lifted its nose, bounced lightly and became airborne. Peter Fungabera and his line of paratroopers disappeared from view under the nose and engine section as the Cessna climbed away, but the aircraft would have to pass directly over the top of their heads at little more than a few hundred feet.
"Oh mother!" Sally-Anne spoke in almost conversational tones. "This is id" And as she said-it, the instrument panel in front of Craig exploded, covering him with fine chips of glass like sugar crystals. Hydraulic fluid sprayed over the front of his shirt.
Machine-gun fire came in through the floor of the cabin and tore out through the thin metal roof so that the interior was filled with a gale of swirling wind as the slipstream found the holes.
In the back seat,. Sarah cried out, and the body of the machine was racked and jarred by the storm of AK 47 bullets. Craig felt the seat under him jump as bullets smacked into the metal frame. jagged punctures appeared miraculously in the wing roots just outside his window.
Sally-Anne shoved the control wheel forward and the Cessna dived back towards the airstrip again with a gut swooping rush, ducking under the maelstrom of machine-gun fire and giving them a moment's respite. The brown earth came up at them, and Sally-Anne caught the Cessna's suicidal dive and held it off, but the wheels hit the surface and they bounced wildly thirty feet back into the air. Craig saw two paratroopers dive to the side as the plane raced towards them.
The wild dive towards the earth had pushed their speed way up, so that Sally-Anne could instantly throw the Cessna into a maximum rate turn, the port wingtip brushing the earth. Her face was contorted and the muscle stood proud in her forearms with the effort of holding the Cessna's nose up in the turn and preventing her from going in. Ahead of them on the left-hand side of the airstrip, only a hundred yards or so from the verge, stood a single tree with dense, widespread branches.
It was a morula, ninety feet tall.
Sally-Anne levelled out for an instant and flew for the morula, her wingt* almost touched its outermost branches, and y immediately she threw the Cessna into an opposite turn, neatly placing the tree between them and the line of paratroopers on the airstrip behind them.
She kept at ground level, her undercarriage brushing the tops of the maize plants in the open fields, glancing up in the rear-view mirror above her head to keep the morula tree exactly behind the Cessna's tail, blanketing the paratroopers" field of fire.
"Where is the Dakota?" Craig asked, raising his voice above the rush of wind through the cabin.
"It's going in to land," Tungata called, and, twisting in his seat, Craig had a glimpse of the big grey machine going in low over the tree-tops behind them, lined up for the airstrip.
"I can't get the undercarriage up." Sally-Anne was thumbing the rocker switch but the three green eyes of the undercarriage warning light still glared at her from the console. "We have damage there, it's stuck." The forest beyond the open fields rushed towards them and as she eased back on the control wheel to lift the Cessna over the tree-tops, a hydraulic lead burst under the shot-ruptured engine housing and hydraulic fluid sprayed in viscous sheets over the windscreen.
"Can't seeP Sally-Anne cried, and pulled open her side window, flying by reference to the horizon under her wingtip.
"We've got no instruments," Craig checked the shattered panel. "Airspeed's gone, rate of climb, artificial horizon, altimeter, gyro compass-"
"The undercarriage-" Sally-Anne interrupted him.
"Too much drag, it will cut down our range we'll never make it back!" She was still climbing, but gradually starting to come around onto her course, using the compass in its glass oil bath above her head, when the engine stuttered, almost cut and then surged again in full power.
Quickly Sally-Anne adjusted pitch and power-settings.
"That sounded like fuel starvation," she whispered. "They must have hit a fuel line." She switched the fuel-tank selector cock from 'starboard" to "both" and then glanced up at Craig and grinned. "Hi there! I missed you something awful "Me too." He reached across and squeezed her thigh.
