Impact (Book 5): Black

me after she came back from the parents’ house of one of the terrorists who killed Howard. She said they had no luck there, but also explained Misha Gagarin had somehow escaped from this building. She told me the two of you arranged for her to go after him, and I wouldn’t need to report it to you. I’m sorry if I was supposed to—”
“Dammit!” he slammed his fists on his desk. “Go get your weapon, ten men, and guard every inch of this floor. From this minute forward, you write down every person who even glances in your direction and give me updates about it every half hour. Go!”
He slumped in his chair. Dorothy’s eyes were fearful, so he went ahead and tossed her some comforting words. “Don’t worry. Howard trusted this man completely. He’ll be fine. I’m more worried about Nerio. She’s like a feral cat when on the hunt. She likes to play with her food…”

CHAPTER 3
Sidney, NE
Grace and Asher dove in between two of the parked coal hoppers, barely missing the connector linking them together. At the same time, a brrrrrt sound belted out from above. The metal cars replied with a hundred zings as the bullets from the machine gun rained down on them.
“Holy crap!” she cried out, blood surging through her temples. She hugged the back end of the metal coal car, hoping it was thick enough to shield her.
The next volley went into the wooden flatcar and her truck.
“Oh no!” she shouted. Her worry was for Diedre, not her truck. She’d been slowest to climb down and had been behind Logan and his dad while they struggled to get underneath the hookup. Was she still over there?
She couldn’t look away. The helicopter hovered sideways, coming closer to being directly above them. The woman aimed her spinning machine gun at the train engine below her, perhaps thinking someone had gone under it. The brrrrt of belched-out rounds tore into the side of the big orange diesel. Scanning the flatbed, and the crawlspace under the boxcar, Grace could see that none of her friends were visible.
“They moved,” she said breathlessly to Asher.
“Are they safe?” he asked while smashed against the car with her.
“Can’t tell. They must be over here with us.” She’d motioned for them to come over right as the woman fired her guns. She prayed they’d made it to safety.
The machine gun cranked over another time, and about five long seconds of bullets streamed down into the parked coal hoppers. They all had a distinctive metallic ring when striking and bouncing against metal. However, they also had unusual angles around the reinforced sides and ends, sparking worry one of those bullets might ricochet and somehow tag them beneath their protective shield.
For a few seconds, the machine gun went quiet.
“Maybe she ran out of ammo,” she said with a hopeful voice.
“I really doubt—” he said, before halting. In the distance, a boom went off, sounding like the thump of an airburst firework.
“What now?” she lamented.
The boom resonated again. This time it was followed by a change in pitch of the helicopter rotors. It was enough to get her to check around the corner. “She’s moving!”
The explosion happened a third time. She caught sight of a puff of white smoke at the truck she’d spotted earlier. Even from a quarter of a mile away, she saw a man aiming an impossibly large rifle in their direction. He had it propped on the hood of his blue pickup truck.
“Jeez, she brought friends.”
As Grace watched, her initial impression quickly changed. The man with the rifle shifted his stance, aiming the weapon at the helicopter now veering away from the trains, over the fields. He fired again, but then pulled the gun off his hood and disappeared out of view.
“I think maybe he was firing at the woman,” she ventured, afraid she saw it wrong, but praying she was right.
The aircraft swooped in a long arc around the mystery truck, as if wary of being targeted again. However, after going around it once, the pilot went back into hover mode, changing the orientation so the woman’s machine gun faced the truck. From there, it was obvious what was about to happen.
“Why doesn’t he fire again?” she wondered, mostly to herself.
Asher came around to join her. He leaned on her back, looking over her shoulder. “Would you stick around if that thing was on top of you?”
“But he was fighting back,” she replied.
The woman’s gun chugged out rounds for a solid ten seconds. The report came on the wind as the truck’s tires exploded, every bit of glass shattered, and the fuel tank was penetrated, sending the back end up in a fireball. A much bigger explosion erupted from the first, creating a blackened mushroom cloud.
The hovering copter had to back up midair to avoid being tagged by the smoke. However, it stayed for twenty or thirty seconds, as if waiting to see if anyone walked out of the firestorm. Eventually, it tilted forward, beginning its advance back to them.
“Shit, she’s not giving up.” Frantic to make sure her friends were in secure hiding places, she tried to find Shawn, Logan, or Diedre, but they weren’t anywhere in sight.
Asher pointed. “She’s there! My sister is under one of these coal cars. You can see her shirt about five cars up the line.”
“Do you see the boys?” she asked, aware the helicopter was seconds from being above them.
“No, I—” He hesitated. “It’s turning away!”
She peeked out. The helicopter had banked again, out over the farm fields. The engine sound was different, too.
“It’s smoking,” Asher declared.
The rotor wash made it difficult to spot, but the more she studied the retreating bird, the easier it was to see the black smoke pouring out one side.