“Shut it down,” I whisper. “Focus.” Lucca is slowing, looking west, and I know he’s thinking it too. “Brother!” I said sharply, “We have work to do. Stay with me.”
Sucking in a deep breath of frigid night air, he nods. “I’m here. I have your back.”
There’s a low sound over the cliffs. It’s familiar, I just heard it, it’s-
Fuck.
Four Blackhawk helicopters rise over the cliff like birds of prey, their running lights are off, but they light up like its high noonwhen their Gatling guns start firing. One swoops toward the front gates, the other three spread out over campus.
“RPG,” Lucca says, grabbing my arm, “the fastest one to set up.” He’s already screwing the rocket-propelled grenade charge on the end of a warhead. A vicious scatter of bullets makes us dive for the shed before the helicopter moves on, the percussive‘rat-tat-tat-tat’of their guns making my ears ring painfully.
“We’re gonna target that asshole,” I said, shouldering the trigger mechanism. “Load me up.” We nearly lose everything when another sweep from their guns gets close, dirt and rock chips spraying our faces. One rock chip digs into my forehead, but I’m back up on my knee and firing within seconds before the blood gets in my eyes.
The Blackhawk explodes in a satisfying cloud of flames and shredded metal.
“Three to go,” Lucca shouts.
Mariya…
The world is fire.
Fire and screaming and the blistering, continuous blizzard of bullets from the helicopter swooping towards us, oddly graceful for a thing bringing so much death. Two of the guards with us drop in a horrifying one-two sequence as the helicopter circles around us, their damn guns firing 6,000 rounds a minute. Stone chunks are shot off the tower and all the glass in the lookout shatters in an instant.
“Cover your head!” I shout, crouching low to stay away from the broken glass flying everywhere like shrapnel.
“Target the pilot! They’re making another pass.” Tatiana screams at me and I nod, shouldering my M110, squinting through my scope. The metal is ice cold against my cheek. She’s raining the side of the Blackhawk with armor-piercing bullets, heavy as hell to load but so effective. We duck another spatter of bullets, horrifyingly, some of them hit the body of one of the dead guards.
Wait. Almost in position, almost…My finger’s on the trigger, hovering. A breath. An exhale. And pull. The bullet blasts through the windscreen and the pilot drops like a bag of dirt on his cyclic stick, sending the chopper in a straight downward pitch over the cliff. The explosion lights up the night sky and for a moment, I can see students racing in every direction. I can’t tell if there’s a ground force. Did soldiers rappel down from the choppers? I can hear guns fired, but I don’t know if it’s at the helicopters or-
Someone is running along the far wall, leaping gracefully over chunks blown out of the rock. Pulling up my night scope, I get a better look.
“It’s Professor MacTavish,” I shout to Tati, who’s matching the south tower and firing at the third helicopter as it sweeps between us, spraying both towers and the ground below us with bullets.
“What the hell is he doing?” she shouts back. I spot soldiers sliding down a line from the fourth Blackhawk and focus. Breath. Exhale. Pull the trigger. At least two of them drop to the ground, lying motionless.
When I raise my head to look for MacTavish again, he’s setting up a massive Gatling gun of his own. He doesn’t have enough shelter. If they target him he’s-
The third helicopter is incinerated. It goes up in a flare of silver sparks and for a heartbreaking moment, I’m reminded of the night Kon and I watched the fireworks from the greenhouse.
MacTavish gives a roar we can hear from here, even with our ringing ears.
Konstantin…
The gunfire obliterated the east guard tower, so when the third helicopter hit it, the entire structure toppled over with the sound of screeching metal, falling with a multitude of broken stones outside of the Academy grounds.
“One left,” Lucca yells in my ear. The last Blackhawk is hovering over the Dean’s building, a perfect position to do the most damage. The soldiers aboard are spraying bullets from both sides of the helicopter, and they’re ripping everything apart before anyone can get close enough to fire on them. Windows shatter in a long line on the first floor of the Student Housing building, and the grass courtyard looks more like Swiss cheese. The surges of flame and explosions keep glinting off the two-story glass arboretum, so it takes me a minute to realize there’s a man inside it.
Larry, the gardener.
He’s standing in the ruins of his flowers and fruit trees. When he kneels, aiming upward, my heart gives a leaden thump. The massive streak of light from his surface-to-air missile shoots upward, perfectly aimed, and illuminates him. Larry is looking up, watching as the helicopter explodes and the arboretum shatters into a million pieces, burying him under several tons of glass.
Chapter Thirty-Three
In which the greatest heroes are the ones you’d least expect.
The Fighter - Gym Class Heroes
Konstantin…
