Even in this weather she could not resist them. Stepping out from beneath the portico, she went across to the oval. The rain had simmered down to a light drizzle. She felt it on her face. It netted her hair like a bride’s veil. She would get married here, of course she would—if she ever divorced her gay husband and married for real, which seemed more improbable with each passing day.

Her tears mixed with the tiny raindrops, and she shook herself, growing angry at her self-pity. Stop it! She admonished herself. Just stop it!

She lifted her head, wiped away her last tear, and that’s when she saw the shadowy figure, lurking beneath the portico where, moments before, she herself had stood. When he saw that she had seen him, he stepped out from the shadows and came very quickly toward her.

*   *   *

Whup-whup-whup!

“Flix!” Whitman called. “The truck!”

Whup-whup-whup!

He turned. “Charlie! Take cover!”

Charlie leapt out of the way as the Hellfire missile came shrieking at them. She scrabbled through her pack. Before they had left, she had loaded it with compact, ultra-lightweight weapons of every new design she had come up with in the past eighteen months, even the unproven prototypes. Unfortunately, to deal with a missile-spitting gunship she was going to have to employ one of those. All or nothing at all, she said to herself with a half-smile, knowing Foxtrot-loving Whit would appreciate the allusion to the 1939 Sinatra song.

She brought out what looked like a blunt instrument, fitted it into the muzzle of a twelve-inch shoulder cannon she had created that used compressed carbon dioxide as a propellant. The blunt instrument contained a highly volatile payload; a normal propellant wouldn’t do.

The gunship was swinging around, machine guns chattering, sending up sprays of gritty soil as it prepared to release another Hellfire. She settled the cannon onto her right shoulder, sighted through the scope. She was about to pull the trigger when she felt Whitman beside her.

“Can you do this?” he whispered in her ear.

Something tightened in the pit of her stomach. “Watch,” she said, “and learn.”

The entire tail assembly was in her crosshairs. She had only a split instant before the gunship was in position to fire the missile. She took a deep breath, let it out, and squeezed the trigger. There was almost no sound from the CO2 propellant. The blunt instrument shot upward. When it struck the tail of the gunship the explosion, a blinding blue white, burned so hot it literally melted the aluminum and steel frame. The rear end of the gunship vanished as if it had never existed. What was left of the vessel canted over to one side and plummeted down in a drunken line.

The edges of the rotors began to plow up the ground, acting like a kind of paddle wheel, impelling the ruined helo forward, directly toward where Charlie and Whitman lay.