"Maloney, Mack - Wingman 07 - Skyfire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maloney Mack)

Darting quickly through the gate and into a huge courtyard, Hunter moved along the edge of the fighting, stopping every few feet to add his tracer-laden machine-gunfire when and where it was needed. Within a half minute, he was able to ease his way toward an opening on the far side of the courtyard that seemed to lead into the castle itself.

Once he'd battled his way to this opening and turned the corner, however, he found two Guardians in his path, their rifles raised. Before they could get off a shot, Hunter dropped them both with the butt of his M-16. The first man was out cold, his jaw shattered and mangled from the sudden blow. The second man, suffering from a busted nose and choking on a mouth full of broken teeth, struggled to his knees and shakily lifted his weapon. But once again, Hunter was too quick. He expertly batted the rifle out of the man's grasp and slammed him back onto the stone floor of the courtyard.

Leaning over the fallen soldier, Hunter instantly jerked off the man's gas mask. Then, jabbing the muzzle of his rifle against the man's forehead, he barked through his own gas mask: "The woman prisoner- where is she?"

The soldier's eyes were wide with fear, but he said nothing, shaking his head as he spit out more teeth. But Hunter had no time to dally. The hand-to-hand fighting was getting worse, as was the automatic gunfire from both sides. The dogfight between the Hinds and the Seasprays was also intensifying, as was the battle between the UA jets and the enemy Phantoms.

So Hunter quickly lowered the M-16, pressed it against the man's groin, and screamed: "Talk!"

The fear on the man's face turned to sheer horror. Although he was a professional, well-paid, killer-for-hire, there were some things more precious to him than gold.

"Up there," he blurted out through bleeding lips, point-

29

ing toward a tower rising from the far corner of the courtyard. "She's up there . . ."

"That's better," snarled Hunter. A sharp punch to the man's jaw combined with the fog of SX-555 gas to knock him unconscious.

Hunter continued through the smaller courtyard until he reached the small door leading into the main building of the fortress. Bursting inside, he raked the main hallway of the castle's entrance with his M-16 tracers, causing the defending Guardians to take cover. This respite proved long enough for the American and Free Canadian troops to smash their way in through the main doors of the castle, carrying the sharp firefight into the corridors of the fortress itself.

The fighting now became particularly vicious in this main hallway. No sooner had the allied forces burst in when the opposing troops were hurling flash grenades and smoke bombs at them with wild abandon while their companions filled the air with a storm of ricocheting bullets.

Hunter added his tracer stream to this hail of lead as he slowly zigzagged his way across the main hallway and toward a long ornate set of marble stairs. Scrambling up this staircase, he reached the first landing and found it split off into two adjoining passageways-one leading up, the other leading down.

Crouched behind a thick marble post off to one side of this landing, firing away with a huge Browning automatic rifle, was his good friend, Catfish Johnson, along with a dozen of his men.

"Glad to see you made it, Hawk," Johnson told him, managing to shake his hand and yell above the racket of the ancient yet still-powerful BAR. "Where you heading?"

Hunter nodded toward the passageway that led up to the castle's tower. "I'm pretty sure Dominique is up there."

At that point, a squad of Free Canadian troopers came running up the other passageway, Major Frost in the lead.

"That way leads down to the dungeon," Frost told them after quickly greeting Hunter. "We broke in through the

30

subbasement, blew down a wall, and trapped a bunch of these Guardians down there. At least temporarily . . ."

Despite the nonstop gunfire, the constant blinding light of flash grenades going off, and the generally ear-splitting racket of warfare, Hunter turned to his friends and said: "Things seem to be under control here . . . I've got to get going ... got things to do."

He started to move past them and toward the hallway that would bring him up to the tower when Frost reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder.

"There's something you should know, Hawk," he yelled. "We spotted an airplane way down in that dungeon. A bunch of these goons were pushing it out of the back and toward that road on the other side of the mountain."

Hunter shrugged anxiously. "So?"

Frost took a quick deep breath. "It was your airplane, Hawk," he said deliberately. "Your F-16 . . ."