Can you take me to the airport?
The rim sang and sparks shot out on the passenger side, a sudden bright orange light that reminded Gradie just how dark everything had been before.
“Well fuck he can’t miss us now,” Luke laughed. On cue, a round cracked through the windshield. After a few grinding seconds, it was clear no one was hit.
“The terminal! Head for the terminals!” Angel’s voice on the comms was tinged with real fear as he pointed frantically toward the distant, wide building at the edge of the concrete plain, which now seemed light-years away.
“Damn, that’s a ways off,” Luke said flatly. Gradie cackled
“Yeah, let’s take a plane. How much you think a one way would be?”
The twins froze and looked at each other.
“What?” Gradie asked. Nova cut the wheel suddenly and the sparks wavered. Another round cracked on the concrete, but the boom was drowned out by the grinding wheel.
“There! There!” Angel pointed out the windshield while studying the drone feed.
“I fucking see it dude!” Nova said. Gradie glanced at the screen. They were heading right for a parked commercial jet, about fifty yards away. The airstairs were down at the front end and the back end was open to the luggage loader.
“You gonna fly it for real?” Luke asked, with a tone that said he would be down either way, but impressed if the answer was yes.
It wasn’t.
“Fuck no!” Angel said. “We’re gonna taxi it over to the terminal, and you can take the sniper rifle and take that mother fucker out from inside the plane.”
“Fuckin A. But won’t you need the NVG to drive?”
“Drone.” The twins said together.
“Oh right. Oh, fuck yeah boys, we got a plan coming—”
A round struck the hood with a piercing cracking sound and the engine exploded.
“Fuck!”
Their momentum dropped immediately.
“Aight get ready to run,” Luke said. He opened the door partway and draped one foot over the slowing concrete.
To Gradie’s surprise, though it probably shouldn’t have been, the evacuation of the burning Honda was extremely orderly. Luke melted out and away from the car with his rifle fanning the area and vanished in an instant. Angel leapt out into the dark after him. Gradie let Nova jump out of the driver’s seat first, then once he had passed behind the car, Gradie opened his door and stepped out into a much quieter and windier world of night.
He could just barely make out the other three silhouetted against a distant carpet of amber light cast off one of the few bulbs still in operation. The four of them came together and formed up without a word, then sprinted in a diamond shape towards the plane, weapons raised. In the windy silence, another sniper round cracked behind them closer to the car. A few seconds later, the Honda exploded behind them, muffling the distant boom and adding to the sensation of untouchable badassery.
They sprinted past the luggage carts at the tail and ran under the right side of the plane towards the stairs. The now blazing Honda wreck threw flickering orange and long shadows across the tarmac, including their own elongated bouncing silhouettes, and the smooth shining fuselage reflected the fire softly and held deep shadows under its wings. Beyond the landing gear, Gradie saw the terminal complex twinkle. Muffled diluted machinegun fire drifted in from miles away and blended with the rumbling gas fire into a distinct white noise. For a moment, his senses assaulted, Gradie forgot where he was, and that strange quasi-nostalgia he had felt in the dark store floated out of the land, as if it had been waiting for him to let his mental guard down.
Luke made it up the stairs first and laughed at the top.
“Aight bros, at least we know the mother fuckers to the east.”
“How? You see him?” Angel asked.
“Cause he ain’t shot at us since we got behind the fucking plane.”
The inside was lit by a few soft under-storage lights and the dreamy starfield glow of the cockpit and its bank of instruments. As they slammed the door shut, a velvet softness replaced the white noise roar of the outside.
Nova and Angel slid into the pilot’s seat and started a flurry of movements guided by something Nova was reading off his phone. Angel set his phone with the drone feed on a bare space between two clusters of buttons, and soon the engines started to spin.
A suppressed crack made Gradie jump. Luke shot out a window with his AR and was unslinging the sniper, an M210 ESR with a folded stock, off his shoulder. He got comfortable in the seats with the barrel out the window, looked through the scope, and laughed.
“Holy shit this scope is thermal.”
“What? Give me back the NVGs!” Nova said.
“Fuck that, you got the drone. Here Corpse, cover my ass.”
Gradie snatched the monocle out of Luke’s hand and got into a seat caddy-corner to Luke’s position, and watched the back row through half-blue half-blind eyes.
“You want me to clear the rest of the plane?”
There was a crack and something smacked near the cockpit.
“Shit! Where’s he at!” Nova said outload.
“I’m looking!” Luke said. “Don’t worry about clearing the plane. if there’s anyone down below, we’re all on the same team now!”
“He might be under a tarp, so don’t trust the thermal too much,” Angel said. “I’m gonna bring the drone—”
“Tarp won’t do shit if he sits under it for more than ten seconds,” Luke said.
“These do. Anti-thermal active heat dispersal.”
“What the fuck? Is that real? Could—” Luke caught himself, but the twins got the idea.
“It’s mostly bullshit for game balance. But ask me again another time.”
Another crack out Luke’s open window, and a sound like a single hailstone over the cockpit. In his peripherals, Gradie saw the twins drop down in unison.
“Shit!”
“He get you?” Luke asked.
“No!”
“Might be rocking thermal as well then. Can’t see you through the glass, just trying to fuck up the controls. Swordsman, I’m thinking that building right there. Your drone see anything?”
“One sec.”
“Quasar!” Luke shouted on the internal comms. “Can you get us fucking moving?! This angle’s fucked!”
“On it bro.” They hopped back in the seats like it was choreographed. A few seconds later, the plane jerked and started moving.
“Ok, this is your captain speaking,” Nova said. “We are experiencing some intermittent sniper fire but we are on schedule to reach the terminal shortly.”
Another thunk in the cock pit.
“Mother fucker that was—”
“Got you bitch!” Luke said, his voice flooding the comms with adrenal excitement like his voice was the end of a blowtorch. The rifle snapped and a casing clattered on the floor.
“Jesus! I saw the splatter on the thermal drone!” Angel said.
“But you couldn’t fucking find him ten seconds ago!”
“He was under some shit, like I said!”
“Yep and guess what? His barrel was hot as fuck. Glowed like Christmas. So where were you looking?”
“Bring the feed back So I can see where the fuck I’m going,” Nova said. “Since Y’all don’t wanna give me the fucking NVGs.”
“What, you gonna hit a deer?” Luke said. “Just drive towards the building. Should be smooth sailing since I—”
At least six rounds sliced through the cabin, cracking in the air outside and zipping and squealing through the interior and singing on the metal, which suddenly sounded very, very thin. A moment later, the distinct boom beat of a machine gun bounced over the wide runway plain.
“Shit! I see him! Fuck!” Luke had been squirming in his seat to keep line of sight on the gunner, but as the plane turned down the runway, his target must have been moved in front of the cockpit.He had his rifle angled as far as he could get it and was kicking the seat in frustration.
“God dammit! I got no line on him!”
“You told me to drive for the terminal so that’s what I’m doing!” Nova snapped as more rounds fell through the plane. Oddly, they weren’t concentrated on any one spot, but cut through seats far down the row in bursts of fabric and sang on every part of the fuselage.
“Wasn’t a fucking dig!” Luke snarled. “Is there like a hatch or something!” Luke was looking up at the roof, rifle clutched like a problem child, spinning around in the row. Gradie realized he had never seen him this mad in the Hardworlds, and he felt sure that Hardworld Luke would have laughed and even joked about an MG gunner catching him in a slow-moving tin can full of jet fuel. What was so different?
“It’s not a fucking train dude!” Nova said.
More rounds fell somewhere down near the tail, but now the cracks outside the window outnumbered the metal thunks in the cabin.
“They can’t fucking see us,” Luke said with a sadistic humor. “Guess their sniper was the only one with thermal.”
Out the windshield, the terminal rolled to their left, becoming a long line of dark glass and sparse lights pointing towards a vanishing point where it and the runway met on the horizon.
A muzzle flashed softly atop a building far ahead on the left, almost at the end of the terminal. Another burst of snarling machine gun rounds zipped into the plain, but these rounds were far more focused, singing only in the cockpit.
“Fucking little bitches!” Luke hissed.
“I think they can see us now!” Angel said.
“They must have handed off the thermal scope to the MG,” Luke muttered to himself. Now that was a tone Gradie had heard before. The puzzle of the fight, the “bullet chess shit” as Luke called it in the clubhouse, had overtaken his anger. Now it was all about the game for him, and for once they were actually in one.
“But the mother fucker can’t see through glass anyway.” Luke moved up to the cockpit as another short burst zipped through the windshield, tearing the pilot seat head rest to pieces. A few moments later, as Luke was taking off the scope and pressing the barrel to the glass, another burst did the same to the copilot seat.
“Saw that shit,” Luke said. The rifle spat, and then it got quiet. Gradie watched the dark buildings through his NVG eye, the vision failing at this range, and waited for more muzzle flash with his rifle raised. Nova, still on the ground, reached up and moved something that must have been the accelerator all the way up, and Angel operated the drone with the phone.
“I see them! Theres three of them.”
“Let me see that shit.” Luke grabbed the screen and Gradie saw Angel had brought the drone lower and had the camera looking in through the terminal sideways. White hot blobs moved on two of the levels.
“There’s four,” Luke said. “Wait, no, now there—”
Muzzle flash twinkled on the building and semi auto rounds cracked through the air and danced off the roof.
“Shit!” Luke dropped the phone, leaving Angel to scramble after it, and put his barrel back through the glass. It snapped and the bolt action got going, and one of the starbursts Gradie had noticed never lit up again. But the rifles still in play were causing serious damage.
A piece of the dashboard shattered off and struck Gradie in the chest. Something started hissing in the cabin. The rounds were getting closer by the second.
“Shit,” Nova said as one whizzed in by his head. “I fucking felt that one on my ear.”
“Little help please,” Luke said in the comms, and Gradie snapped to it, stepping up to the windshield and pacing the end of his suppressor in one of the wider bullet holes, and started firing at the general area. The muzzle flashes bloomed beautifully in his NVGs. The effect was not quite as he remembered from his gunfights with the team, and he guessed their NVGs on the job were of a higher caliber.
The AR fire withered, and for a few seconds it seemed the worst was over, until the MG started up again.
“God damn I knew that shit was coming!” Luke said, ducking as the cockpit cracked apart.
“Fuck we gotta bail!” Luke yelled out loud.
“What?” shrieked the twins.
“Make a run for the building! Throw a smoke!”
“It’s like a hundred yards dude! We’ve only got one smoke!”
Gradie let his fire become automatic responses to muzzle flash, while the rest of his mind went to work, scanning his memory of what they had on them, glancing at the thermal overview of the drone feed and out the window, until an idea popped out.
“Bet if we blew up the plane it would be enough smoke.”
“What?” the twins said.
Luke laughed.
“Oh hell yeah, let’s go.” Luke took one last parting shot with his rifle then skipped out of the cockpit. Gradie and the twins stood there a moment, alone, rounds zipping in the windshield and cracking behind the controls, then shot up and followed him.
“How we gonna blow up the plane without killing ourselves?” Angel hissed.
“With this.” Luke waved the flat C4 pouch Gradie had handed him out of the armored pack and a bullet whizzed by in the air.
The twins flinched and dropped down. “Shit dude watch that thing!”
Gradie kicked open the overwing emergency door while Luke tore the cover off the adhesive.
“One, two...” Luke said at a mockingly slow pace.
“Fucking throw it!” “Fuck you dude!” the twins yelled.
Luke frisby tossed it out the window and Gradie watched it sail through the air and land on the wing, where the 737’s fuel tanks were located.
“Aw shit, I missed,” Luke said.
“God dammit!” “You should have let me throw it!”
Gradie and Luke left the twins there groaning and kicked open the opposite side overwing doors while Gradie took point with his shorter rifle and nightvision, and stepped out and landed on the wing just as a burst of MG fire cracked down the strip. Outside, in the illuminated sight of his NVGs, the horizon hummed with activity. He had about half a second to appreciate it before he rolled off the wing and onto the tarmac.
