The Dragons of Englor by Jeffrey Lord

Author:Jeffrey Lord [Lord, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Adventure
Amazon: B000RL7XPW
Goodreads: 2035765
Publisher: Pinnacle
Published: 1977-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Blade parachuted in on his mission to help Rilla Haran defect. His rendezvous, with the geneticist lay in the satellite country of Rodzmania, on the shore of an inland lake three hundred miles from the nearest coast.

So Blade crossed into enemy territory at twice the speed of sound, fifty thousand feet up, aboard a strategic reconnaissance plane of the Imperial Air Force. He sat on a folding seat in the electronic warfare officer's compartment, watching the enemy coast scribble itself in glowing white across the dark radar screen, then slowly drift away behind them.

Twenty miles inland alarms bleeeeped fiercely, warning of enemy missiles on the way up. With the unpretentious coolness of an old hand at this sort of game, the pilot waited calmly as the six missiles closed at nearly three times the speed of sound. Then he launched the Number One decoy. The decoy was a miniature jet plane, as fast as the bomber for short distances and equipped to give off the same radar signal. The decoy raced off toward the missiles. Blade watched it go on the screen.

It met the missiles. Six proximity fuses activated six warheads. Decoy and missiles vanished together as explosions laced the frozen stratosphere with flame and flying metal.

The shock wave threw Blade from his seat to the floor. Before he could recover, the pilot was twisting the controls, sending the big plane plunging down through ten miles of sky to level off just above the treetops. Through the windows, Blade had a good look at the forests of Rodzmania hurtling toward him at six hundred miles an hour.

The pilot grinned. "We started down right after the explosion and went down fast until we went off their long-range radars. They probably think they got us. Even if they're wondering, it'll take them half an hour to organize a low-level search of the area. By that time we'll have dropped you and be on the way out. They don't have a really good radar network for tracking low-altitude intruders, so we shouldn't have too much trouble."

"Good luck," said Blade, with feeling. "I'm glad I don't have to do this for a living."

The pilot's eyebrows rose in wry amusement. "You could say that, I suppose. But then we could say exactly the same thing about your job."

"I suppose you could," said Blade, and left it at that. He did not look down on those men of war who fought their battles as part of complex teams of men and highly sophisticated machines. He respected their courage and their skills. But he'd long since recognized that he had very little in common with them. He was a man who fought best alone.

Blade looked at his watch. They would be coming up to the drop point in another ten minutes. He raised one hand in a final salute to the bomber crew, while with the other he opened the door leading aft to the bomb bay. It closed behind him, and he was alone with darkness and the distant thunder of the engines all around him.

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