Operation Southern Cross - 02 by Jack Shane Page A

of the lake. Its ability to stay so low is what saved it for the first thirty seconds or so. There were gunmen around two-thirds of the lake, but shooting at something in the middle was their hardest shot.
    Meanwhile, Autry had banked hard and immediately let loose a volley of rockets over the center of the Wild West town, the location of a lot of the ground fire. He didn’t have the time to actually aim the damn things—at the moment, he just wanted to make some noise and let the ghostly shooters below know there was someone else up there.
    The barrage had the intended effect: His missiles began picking off buildings on both sides of the street, blowing half of them sky high. He saw people running, diving, fleeing below. Some were aflame. Suddenly the fire and brimstone was coming from the opposite direction.
    Autry then put the copter on its tail and folded over. Now all his forward guns were lined up with the nearest edge of the lake’s shoreline. His four gunners in the rear opened up, firing their enormous fifty-caliber machine guns in every direction. Meanwhile, WSO Zucker, Autry’s copilot, engaged the copter’s four nose-mounted cannons. These weapons too had the ability to make things like buildings, jungle and people simply disappear. That’s why within just thirty seconds of their arrival, the sky above El Tapos looked like it was on fire.
    While all this was going on, McCune had managed to get his copter under some semblance of control, pulling up to a slowly moving hover over the middle of the lake. It was obvious, even in the darkness and confusion, that the water was just a few feet deep, even at the center.
    It was then that McCune told the super spy this was where he was getting out. The super spy had different ideas, but McCune, never one to mince words, insisted. The mission was to put him down, hot situation or not, and McCune, for a change, was just following orders.
    But the super spy did not want to go. So McCune requested two of the huge XBat troopers riding in back to assist in the deplaning. They picked the spy up and threw him out the door. He hit the water with a splash and immediately began swimming toward the far shore.
    By this time, Autry and his crew had finished strafing the nearby beach. He turned the gunship over and headed to cover McCune. But bullets that had ripped through McCune’s fuselage moments before were now taking their toll. Many of his hydraulic lines had been severed. His power systems were short-circuiting, and he was losing air pressure in his turbos. Not a good situation.
    McCune didn’t want to crash into the lake—no matter how shallow it was, rotor blades whipping around in water tended to break into hundreds of razor sharp shards that moved fast enough to tear through the skin of the copter and all those inside.
    Common sense told McCune that heading toward the far shore would be his best chance at survival. But that was the way the super spy was heading, and he didn’t want to draw fire down on the man they’d just delivered.
    That’s why McCune turned his copter around and headed for the side of the lake in the exact opposite direction as the man was swimming. Autry caught on right away and strafed that end of the beach as well. Autry observed the super spy safely reaching dry land and turned over to see that McCune had crashed on the near side of the lake.
    Autry rushed for the crash site. He arrived overhead to see McCune and his guys jumping out of the copter, the gunners picking up their machine guns from their collapsible mounts and dragging miles of ammunition belts with them. Autry did another hard bank, his men firing the whole time, keeping off the three waves of gunmen now rushing toward the downed copter.
    But suddenly a barrage of bullet rounds tore through the underbelly of Autry’s copter. He and Zucker would have been killed instantly if they hadn’t been sitting in a reinforced cabin. In a heartbeat, though, things began sparkling and