Moving as one, they slipped toward their target.

Bullets rattling against his underfuselage, Graham shoved forward on the cyclic and added collective to pull pitch. The cockpit's lightweight boron shielding had literally saved his ass, but he wasn't about to press his luck by taking any more direct hits. Not without being able to return fire owing to Brazilian restrictions against Sword's fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft being fitted for attack capabilities. Muito obrigado to whoever came up with that one.

As the Skyhawk banked into a steep climb, he glanced out his windscreen and quickly noted the firepower his attackers were bringing to bear. Neither the rifles nor the HMDs to which they were connected looked like anything he'd ever seen before.

"I'm sticking around till you get a shot of those lunatics out to the chase teams, Mitch," he shouted, nodding toward the television screen on their console. "I don't want anybody being surprised by their hardware."

Mitch returned his nod and reached for the video controls. Gripping the sticks hard, Graham figure-eighted back toward the jeeps to get his nose pod aligned for a good camera angle--and then some of the gunmen abruptly jumped from their vehicles and began darting for cover.

There was, he observed, a considerable amount available to them, mainly crawler cranes, bulldozers, excavators, wheeled compactors, and other heavy equipment that had been rolled into the area for construction of some new buildings. They were big and stationary, their sheer size making them ideal places to hide behind.

Graham continued to orbit the scene in a weaving pattern. Out beyond the bulking machinery he saw the radial web of access routes that led in toward the installation's hub, and turning his gaze northward, spotted the burning ruins of two chase cars on the main roadway from the motor pool. An emergency rescue vehicle and additional cars had pulled up nearby. A number of security men were walking up and down the road with long-handled mine sweepers, while others milled around the wreckage in a desperate attempt to extinguish the flames and locate survivors.

Then he saw what had sent the invaders scrambling. Their roof lights flashing, two quick-response squads were speeding toward them on secondary access roads, one on the left, the other on the right, each three-car group escorted by a Skyhawk. They would be on top of the jeep convoy within seconds.

"We sending down pictures yet?" he asked, glancing at Mitch.

Mitch nodded again and gestured at the television screen. It showed a detailed IR image of the gunmen in one of the jeeps.

"Nice shot, real nice," Graham said. "Now let's pray the guys on the ground are seeing them clear as we are."

The pictures were just fine, coming through on the monitors of the chase cars and helicopters exactly as they appeared to Graham and Winter in the air. Moreover, the information relayed by those pictures proved invaluable to the QR squads, giving them an instantaneous heads-up on the number of invaders they would be facing, the positions they held, and the type of weapons they were carrying.