They ducked inside, and Austin hit the door switch. There was another grinding of motors and machinery, and slowly the door began to close. The chopper landed a few hundred yards away. Armed men in dark green uniforms spilled out and advanced on the hangar with automatic weapons.

Unfortunately Zavala had left his machine pistol in the plane. Austin's Bowen revolver filled his hand, and he let off a couple of shots to give the attackers something to think about. Then the door clanked shut, and the gunfire became barely audible.

“We'd better bolt the back door,” Austin said, sprinting for the rear of the hangar where they had come in.

They ran along the corridor to the cellar hole. The bolt was rusted away, and they couldn't secure the door. Hoping their attackers were as stupid as they were bold, they dragged one of the mattresses out of a bunkroom and covered the ventilation hole in the floor in a makeshift pitfall. Then they dashed back and secured the door leading directly into the hangar. All was silent, but they had no illusions about their security. It was obvious that the attackers didn't want to damage the flying wing, but a few well-placed rockets or ex plosives could peel back the hangar's metal walls like a sardine can.

“Who are those guys?” Zavala said, trying to catch his breath.

There was a sharp hammering on the metal skin of the hangar as if someone were testing it for weakness. Austin's coral green eyes swept the hangar from one end to the other.

“If I'm not mistaken, we're about to find out.”

NUMA 2 - Blue Gold

CHAPTER 31

The siege was announced with an ear-splitting explosion that echoed off every square inch of steel, as if the metal-enclosed space were a huge bell. Shards of hot metal and pieces of burning vegetation rained down from a hole high in the front face of the hangar. A patch of daylight opened, but the thick cushion of vegetation and earth that had grown up around the hangar over the decades had dampened the explosion.

Austin looked up at the ragged hole and said, “They're aiming high so they won't hit the plane. Probably hoping to spook us.”

“They're doing a good job,” Zavala said. “I'm spooked.”

In fact, Zavala looked anything but spooked. He would have retired from the Special Assignments Team long before if he succumbed easily to panic. His eyes calmly scanned the interior of the hangar looking for something that would give them even the slightest edge.

The reverberations from the blast had barely faded when there was a loud hammering on the steel door at the rear of the hangar.

“So much for our pitfall,” Austin said.

They raced behind the plane and grabbed tool chests, benches, and storage lockers, anything they could move, stacking them against the door. The makeshift barricade would stall deter mined attackers only a few minutes. They were more concerned with the front of the hangar, where the main firepower appeared to be concentrated. As they darted under the plane's fuselage Zavala glanced up at the jet engines. The yawning black exhausts protruding from the rear of the wing resembled cannon barrels lined up on a fort. He grabbed Austin by the arm.