Stones didn't leave a telltale muzzle flash to shoot back at. Valentine fired twice more into the darkness. He helped Hornbreed in, felt a sudden pain as a stone struck him in the leathers just below the shoulder blade. Valentine dived inside.
Stones and thrown spears rattled against the fuselage like a dying hailstorm. More yips and coyote howls broke out around the aircraft, along with a deeper drumming.
The banging grew louder. Voices just outside the fuselage shouted, and the clattering redoubled as the Jaguars banged on the overturned plane with hand weapons.
Valentine checked the lock on the rear cargo door, crept to the missing front door. A shadow loomed outside; Valentine marked a tangle of dirty hair held in place by a broad headband. He fired and the head disappeared.
"Fhway! Fhway! Fhway!" a voice shouted outside from just beneath the pilot's seat.
Valentine smelled woodsmoke. He went to the copilot window,
saw a figure with a flaming torch, and opened the window, but a hand grabbed the muzzle of his gun. Valentine jerked it back violently, shot through the fuselage at where the grabber must have been standing, then found his torch target was gone.
Hornbreed said something, but his words were lost in the hammering on the fuselage. They might as well have tried to converse on the inside of a giant drum. Valentine smelled more smoke, unsheathed his sword; there was nothing to do but go out the missing door. Otherwise they'd cook.
Hornbreed suddenly opened the door, stuck his flare gun up.
"No", Valentine shouted.
A knife blade stabbed in, glinting on the sudden illumination of the flare. Hornbreed fell back from it. Valentine brought the handy little carbine around and fired through the fuselage again. A hand appeared as one of the Jaguars tried to hoist himself in. Valentine discouraged it by severing a couple of fingers with the sword. He shouldered his gun again.
Thunderous pounding outside - How the hell are they making that noise? Then Valentine realized he was hearing the beating rotors of a helicopter.
Tracer lit up the pinkening dawn, bright shards of yellow rain from the sky. The hammering on the fuselage let off and Valentine saw the warriors scatter.
"It's the pickup chopper!" Hornbreed almost shouted. Hope had given him new strength.
Valentine looked outside, saw a big bulbous desert-tan fuselage, a greenhouse of glass at the front, red and green running lights, a uniformed gunner at an oversized door at the side. Valentine grabbed his clip light and used the signaling switch to blink three times at the craft. Three times again, three times again. They might not know the old Quisling Coastal Marine distress code, but the gunner swerved his crosshairs away from the flipped aircraft.
The faint popping of small-arms fire sounded. Hornbreed crawled to the rear cabin door and waved. Men tumbled out of the helicopter.
Valentine saw another prop plane roar overhead, turning tight circles around the crash site.
Hornbreed waved Valentine out the door. Valentine surrendered his gun, sword, and pack to a corporal. Another soldier, a businesslike submachine gun in his grasp, eyed Valentine. Three soldiers and a medic assisted the noncom, one of them openly gaping at the hunter-gatherer, still twitching at the extremities. Valentine heard one of the soldiers shouting something about a "salvage bird" into a headset.
"Rough night", Hornbreed wheezed at the medic, who helped him out the door and toward a litter. "Forget that. I want to get in the chopper with him".
He held out an arm to Valentine, and accepted a lift. "Max, help me on the bird of paradise. We'll be in Yuma in time for cocktails".
Pyp's Flying Circus, Yuma, Arizona: The old Colorado River steamboat stop grew up under three flags, Spanish, Mexican, and finally the Stars and Stripes after the territory was acquired in the Gadsden Purchase. Famous after the Civil War mostly for its territorial prison, it became an important military hub and storage center thanks to its dry climate, ideal for testing and storing hardware of various kinds, and the premier Marine Corps pilot training center.
Under the Aztlan Kur, an association of like-minded Kurians covering northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States called the "Confederation" by the locals, it's still a city that breeds pilots. The more mundane Aztlan Air Carriers shuttle Quisling dignitaries and churchmen from post to post and fly police patrols, but the much more colorful "Flying Circus" of airborne mercenaries, with their distinctive winged-rattlesnake insignia, is what people usually refer to when speaking of the fliers of the Southwest.
In typical Kurian fashion Pyp's Flying Circus is divided into three centers for better control. Most of the fliers and their families live in Yuma, in well-guarded gated communities. Their amenities are so plentiful that it's hard to recognize them as hostages to their good behavior. Airplane storage and maintenance is located at the famous aircraft graveyard at the old Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, now just called "Lucky Field" by the ground staff, thanks to the job security it affords, and "DM" by the fliers. Pyp's operational headquarters is in Tempe, where orders are received from the Kurians and planes are armed and staged for their various missions. No one group of officers, and no one Kurian, really commands the Circus, though all think of their titular figurehead commander as the unit's boss.
There's an air of ringmaster flamboyance to their beloved "Pyp". Patrick Yenez-Powell is the sort of man who stands out in a crowd, not always an advantage that leads to survival in the Kurian Order. With his round-brimmed, blacky felt Navajo hat, river-guide sandals, gold earring and necklaces, often grease-stained denim flight suit, and elaborately beaded shoulder rig for his ivory-handled peacemaker, he's easy to pick out in a crowd. Though on the ugly side of fifty, he still moves with a spring in his step, and he's hard to follow, as he changes direction the instant he spots anything from flaking paint to litter to a misplaced tool; an adjutant usually carries a bag for such trash that blows across Pyp's transom, which will then be upended on some unfortunate lieutenant's desk.
David Valentine met the mind behind the odd wardrobe and energetic body on a hot April afternoon in Yuma.
* * *
The long trip, begun in the noisy vibration of the helicopter, was briefly suspended at a refueling stop at a service strip, where they shoveled down a quick meal of eggs and sausage. After breakfast they were both dusted with some kind of disinfectant/insecticide. Then it was back in the beater until another landing at the sprawling air base in Tucson, where they switched to a tiny, cramped prop plane for the final leg, which left Valentine tired and disoriented. Other than his astonishment over the distance they'd traveled in just a few hours, he also felt nauseous with fatigue.
He wanted cool and darkness when they arrived at Yuma. The soldiers threw their dunnage in a propane-powered flatbed and whisked Hornbreed, Valentine, and the medic with a clipboard full of notes off to a white building with the traditional red cross painted on its roof and walls. Valentine surrendered his weapons again to a pair of desert-camouflaged men with sidearms and blue-banded helmets. Hornbreed whispered into one of the military policemen's ears, but said little else until they reached the triage room, where he refused any attention until the MPs showed up again and looped a laminated ID card around Valentine's neck. Then Hornbreed allowed himself
to be put in a wheelchair and taken to an operating room.
Valentine fell asleep on the paper-covered table of an examining room. A thin woman who looked like a hat tree in a lab coat, stethoscope over her shoulder, woke him and checked his eyes, lymph nodes, pulse, and temperature. She asked him how he felt and where he'd traveled in the last month and he answered honestly.