"We're being jammed! Somebody's just turned on a powerful cascade jammer out there!"
"We have descending traffic to port!" Smyslov yelled. "He's turning in on us!"
The Centurion's wing kicked up and over. Accelerating into a shallow dive, the plane cut across the helicopter's flight path from left to right. In the dark rectangle of the plane's open cargo door, a ruddy spark danced and sputtered. Pale streaks of light blazed past the cabin.
Tracers.
"Breaking left!" Randi screamed, throwing the cyclic hard over and smashing down on her rudder bar.
The Long Ranger came up on one rotor tip and wailed into a diving turn of its own, cutting into and under the Cessna. The two aircraft flicked past one another like a pair of rapier blades.
Lift and power sagged, and Randi twisted the throttle grip to its stop, stabilizing the helicopter onto its new course. "Where is he?" she demanded, looking around wildly for their attacker.
"Climbing out at four o'clock," Smith replied, looking aft out the side windows. "It looks like he's circling back, trying to get in behind us again. Can you lose him?"
She made a few rapid mental assessments and was not happy with the outcome. "Not likely. There's no way I can extend out over open water like this. He's got a good sixty knots on us. He can also outclimb us."
"Options?"
"Limited! With his gun firing out of his side door like that, he's got a very restricted firing arc. When he comes in on us I can evade by turning into him and diving under him, like I just did. But that'll only work for as long as we have altitude! Once he pins us down against the surface of the sea he can circle above us like the Apaches circling a wagon train. He'll cut us to pieces."
The wave tops glittered below the Long Ranger's pontoons. They had not been flying at any great height to begin with, and their initial evasion had cost them a great deal of what they'd had. Randi had the Long Ranger shuddering at a maximum power climb, but in this game of dogfighting beggar-my-neighbor she couldn't regain what she'd expended fast enough.
"Keep on that radio," Smith commanded. "Try to get through to anyone."
"It is no good," Smyslov interjected grimly. He had been working the communications panel. "That plane's jammer is cutting right across all of our communications bands. While it's active no one will be hearing or saying anything within twenty kilometers of us."
"Are you sure?" Smith demanded.
Smyslov gave a bitter, ironic grimace. "Unfortunately, yes. I recognize the interference modulation pattern of the unit. The bloody thing is one of ours! It's a Russian army tactical electronic warfare system."
"There he is!" Valentina Metrace called from her side of the helicopter. "He's coming around again!"
Randi felt a hand reach around the seat back, yanking her Lady Magnum out of its pack holster. She didn't have to look back to see who the hand belonged to.
"That's not going to be much, Jon," she commented.
"I know." There was a grim tinge of humor in his reply. "But it's what we've got." Randi heard the wind roar of the rear passenger window sliding open, and the chill blast of the slipstream on the back of her neck.
"Be careful you don't hit the rotors," Randi yelled over the increased wind roar.
"I'll be lucky to hit anything!"
"Hostile at eight o'clock, high angle!" Smyslov chanted. "Hostile is at nine o'clock, still climbing. Hostile is at ten o'clock...He's banking! He's turning in! He's coming in faster this time!..."
The tracer stream cut past the windscreen, and again Randi rolled the Long Ranger into its steep evasive break. As the helicopter rolled onto its side, there was a momentary frozen image of the attacking Cessna cutting past them, the plane's gunner half-hanging out its cargo door.
Like a Vietnam-era helicopter gunner, he was suspended from a monkey harness bolted into the door frame. Some kind of medium machine gun was strapped to his body, the belt feeding from an overhead magazine, making him a living flexible weapons mount. Looking down, he hosed death at the diving Long Ranger, the flash of an exhilarated grin glinting on his face.
Behind her, handguns crashed, both pistols firing at once, the piercing crack of Smith's automatic and the heavier slam of her revolver. Ejecting brass flickered around the cockpit, and Randi caught a whiff of gun smoke as Smith got off half a dozen rounds before the