"Steve, come on!" Morgan yelled uselessly from the rooftop, waving his arms frantically at the pilot. "Land the bastard! Put it down! Put it down!"
Morgan could barely see Mason. He found himself running from side to side across the rooftop, trying to find an angle from which he could see through to the pilot, to catch his eye, to communicate with him somehow. But Mason was hell-bent on saving the crippled aircraft. Starved of fuel, it was everything he could do to keep the chopper airborne long enough to get back over the roof and shut down. Second by second, the helicopter was dying around him as he fought against the savage winds to bring it back over the hotel.
Finally, the big chopper coughed, and coughed again, lurching upon its own centre of gravity. Incredibly, the aircraft was still aloft. But with another violent cough and splutter, the nose of the chopper suddenly dipped, bringing the still spinning rotor blades sweeping across the edge of the rooftop, straight for Morgan. He stumbled and fell. Like a scuttling crab, he moved backwards fast, clear of the path of the gigantic, spinning razor-sharp blades. Missing him by a few feet, they tore through the edge of the roof. Sparks and bits of rooftop exploded everywhere.
Then it happened. The cockpit suddenly erupted into a catapulting ball of fire, arcing high into the black veil of smoke that cloaked Cullentown, before dropping to the road. Through it all, Morgan saw Mason's arms reach up to shield his face as the angry flames of the blaze enveloped him. In the same instant, the burning cockpit tumbled earthward and the detached tail section of the defeated beast, with rotors still spinning, burst out from within the inferno, striking at the hotel's exposed rooftop like the attacking venomous tail of a giant crippled scorpion.
Morgan was instantly back on his feet. Guarding his injured ribs with his left hand and grabbing the AKM with his right, he raced for the stairs at full speed while the tail section of the mammoth burning mechanical insect cartwheeled across the roof, heading straight for him.
* * *
From a few hundred metres away, behind the advancing rebel lines, Victor Lundt heard the explosion and saw the remains of the helicopter smash onto the street in a spectacular shockwave of flame and debris. The dazzling orange flash of the blast was reflected in his cold eyes. He knew it would be the Chiltonford chopper, with Mason at the controls, but he felt nothing.
Lundt knew things were well and truly turning to shit - that much was obvious. The rebel leadership was floundering at the frontline and the great Baptiste was nowhere to be found. There were pitched battles going on everywhere and, despite the rebels appearing to have the upper hand, the coup could still go either way. If it failed, and the government took back control, Lundt would have to make tracks back behind the rebel lines fast, before he ran into anybody from Chiltonford.
After all, as far as the Chiltonford crew was concerned, he was missing presumed dead.
CHAPTER 29
Down in the lobby scanning the faces of the evacuees, Mike Fredericks was abour to head back up to the roof in search of Morgan, when a catastrophic explosion vapourised the entire front section of the Francis Hotel. Fredericks was blown off his feet and hurled into the gaggle of distraught evacuees. Two of Fredericks' guards were killed instantly. The old hotel was torn wide open. People were in a frenzy of terror and panic, clambering over one another in a bid to find safety away from whatever it was that had just destroyed their last line of defence from the battles in the streets.
Disoriented by the blast, Fredericks composed himself, checked those around him, then headed straight for the blazing mess. In the back of his mind he toyed with the notion that it had been a rocket attack, but experience told him the blast was much, much more. No, he thought, pushing through the wreckage of the hotel, something big has just been hit. His mind was racing with a thousand images, thinking of Morgan and Mason, fearing the worst.
"Where the hell are they?" demanded Fredericks to no-one in particular. With his AKM gripped firmly, ready to fire, not knowing what would confront him, Fredericks bounded over a smoking mangle of concrete, glass and burning furniture in the hotel foyer. The place was destroyed. The stench of a fuel fire and smouldering human bodies filled his nostrils and left Fredericks gagging. The intense blaze fell like a locust plague across the street, feeding greedily on every last morsel of oxygen to prolong its fleeting, malevolent existence. The heat was unbearable. Fredericks stumbled across a discarded AKM and soon located a second, half-buried, high up in a pile of what had been the front wall of the hotel. After a few seconds searching, he found what was left of his men.
Fredericks had witnessed some nauseating sights in his time but this had to be amongst the worst. Seconds before, the two guards had run to the front northeast corner of the hotel to check the progress of the rebel offensive. They had been there only a matter of moments when a rebel soldier had appeared from nowhere and fired an RPG-7, blasting the Chiltonford Super Puma from the sky. Jonah, one of the guards, had reacted quickly to the rocket attack on the helicopter and managed to fire off half a magazine at the RPG man. The rounds hit the rebel squarely across his abdomen, spinning him off his feet in a macabre pirouette. The body was thrown like discarded garbage across the street in a bloody spray. At the same moment, the helicopter's flaming carcass had plummeted from the sky, its tortured wreckage pulverised on impact, splintering across the roadway and propelling a massive orbicular wall of fire through a 150 metre radius, consuming everything in its path, including the front of the hotel. By the time Fredericks found his men, Jonah and Michael, they'd been incinerated, stone dead before their bodies were thrown back into the hotel by the force of the blast. They'd landed in separate charred bundles against the ruins of the south wall. Fredericks had given them their orders less than a minute before, but now he gazed fixedly down at their remains. Choking back the bile, he turned and ran out into the chaos of the street.