"Those are EuroFighter aircraft," Wheeler said. "They'll come fully loaded. And if they don't get us, there's always the SAM-sites."

Skater peered through the heavy rain as the warning was repeated, broken up by the electricity swirling around them. He couldn't see anything. The amphibian was hanging there like a kid's kite, waiting for a load of buckshot to take it down. His mouth was dry.

"Fiat-Fokker, this is your last-" The lightning knifed a blinding arc through the storm tossed clouds, cutting out the radio. Less than a heartbeat later, the peal of thunder cracked a sonic whip across the sky.

By then Wheeler was already moving. The amphibian heeled over sideways in response to his command. "No holding back now. We hesitate, we're soup meat."

"Go," Skater told him.

The amphibian's motor screamed. Under other circumstances the noise trapped in the cabin would have been deafening, but it was drowned out by the storm's fury. Another heated blast of cold white lightning slashed through the bowels of the dark clouds, momentarily creating a light funnel.

The altimeter dropped to twelve hundred meters. From what Skater had learned, the Border Patrol had standing orders to shoot anything that went below the thousand-meter mark. He glanced at the compass, a swirling ball suspended in a silicon mixture. The latitude and longitude, fed into the Fiat-Fokker's computer by a GPS satellite overhead, printed on the sides of the vibrating ball. The numbers shifted erratically as the amphibian tumbled.

Skater peered out the window but couldn't see anything. Lightning cracked again, but this time it was echoed by 20mm cannonfire that blew white-hot holes in the cloud cover less than thirty meters away. The concussions battered the amphibian. He brought up the IR panel, using the forward-looking infrared Wheeler had added to the plane's nose. Even with the IR and the memorization of the terrain maps he'd studied, he had a hard time spotting the Portland Wall until they were almost on top of it. The Wall surrounded the city and was controlled by heavily armed and well-guarded checkpoint stations. The Willamette River was a black ribbon that twisted through the green-hued landscape on either side of the Wall.

"Someone's got a target lock." Wheeler juked the amphibian left and down.

The Wall swept by below them, and a Fresh swarm of cannonfire lit up the airspace in front of them. Wheeler powered through the twisting gray smoke (hat was being quickly ripped apart by the storm winds. Screaming in protest against the abuse and the howling gale of the storm, the Fiat-Fokker shivered.

"Find a spot," Skater told Wheeler. "Put it down." He tapped on the radio com and put out a message that he guessed would be picked up by the Border Patrol. If it wasn't, it wouldn't affect the outcome. "Bushwhacker, this is Special Delivery. We're coming in hot and heavy. If you can assist, give me some kind of fragging response here." He repeated the message, then stopped in the middle of another ragged streak of lightning that nuked the cloudfront.

"Drek," Wheeler said. "Those jets have just kicked loose a pair of missiles."

Wheeler dropped altitude quickly, hitting five hundred meters and still plunging. The two heat-seeking missiles the EuroFighters had fired impacted against the heat flares the dwarf dumped out of the tail section. For the most part, the flares did the job of keeping the warheads away, but fragments holed the amphibian in a deadly drumbeat.

At two hundred meters and low enough now that Skater could see the landscape with his low-light enhancement, cannonfire ripped through the right wing, shearing off the last third of it.

"Frag me running." the dwarf groaned. "This is going to get ugly now." He tried to level the amphibian out, but it was no use. The tallest trees in the forest scratched against the Fiat-Fokker's underbelly while white phosphorus flames chewed the amputated wing. The plane flipped, twisted sideways as it sheared through a copse of trees. The amphib pancaked, rammed its good wing into the ground long enough to rip it free of its moorings, then skidded to a stop against a rocky hillside.

The silence after the crash was eerie.

Even with his low-light vision working. Skater had a hard time seeing. Worse than that, his safety harness was jammed. Using a knife he'd stuffed into his boot, he cut through the straps and managed to fall somewhat gracefully.

Wheeler shucked his harness and held onto it as he flipped over to land on his feet.

Archangel managed on her own, then immediately began checking on her deck. Elvis's straps had jammed too, and he finally gave up and ripped them free. Cullen Trey was the first out the crumpled door after Duran kicked it open.

Skater moved to the cargo hold with Duran. He peered into the sky, but not much was visible through the canopy of trees overhead. He hoped it meant the EuroFighters couldn't spot them either.

"Wheeler, how far to the river?"

"Half a kilometer," the dwarf answered. "'We came down just about where we planned it."

Opening the cargo hold with effort, Skater yanked out the first undersea sled and passed it over to Elvis. "Grab your gear," he ordered. "We're going to get clear of this area as soon as possible."

Duran took up a position on the other side of him and began passing out scuba equipment.

"Elvis, you've got point. Archangel, Wheeler, and Cullen are with you. Duran and I will bring up drag as soon as we finish here."

In addition to a scuba tank and flippers, each team member also carried their own gear and a canvas bag of equipment. The trek through the forest was going to be grueling.

"Let me have your airtank," Archangel said. They hadn't brought one for her, but each undersea sled had both an emergency tank and a regulator built in, and all had re-breathers to eradicate the telltale bubbles. "It'll lessen some of the weight while you bring the other sled."

Skater didn't argue.

A cocky grin was on Trey's face. "I guess we'll all gather at the river, then? How pagan." He took off, closing distance with the others quickly.

Skater reached into the hold and hefted out one of the bodies. Duran was busy beating the access panel off the engine area. Once he had it open, the ork knelt down with a broad-bladed knife in his fist. The smell of fuel quickly blotted out the odor of death that had been trapped in the hold.

The ground around the impact area was rocky and hard. The scars from the crash cut deeply into it, revealing shattered white rock.

Skater shoved the first corpse into the cockpit, then followed it with the second in short order. By then the leaking fuel was already making pools on the ground.

"Ready?" Duran asked.

Skater nodded and hoisted the undersea sled over his shoulder. It was constructed of composite materials, mainly polymers and ceramics, and weighed thirty-two point seven kilos. At a meter and a half long and two meters across and triangular in shape, it wasn't hard to lift and carry, but getting it through the forest was going to be slotting tricky. He started toward the river as Duran twisted the cap off a flare.

The fuse lit, and bright, hard scarlet fire burned the night away. He pitched the flare into one of the fuel puddles.

Yellow and blue alcohol flames jetted up from the pool nearly a meter away. They seemed to pause for an instant, then raced toward the broken amphibian.

Flames engulfed the Fiat-Fokker as more of the ordnance did increasing damage. Fiery comets spewed into the air in all directions, and flaming bits of the wreckage hung in the trees and against the hillside.

Despite the terrain and the weight, Skater and Duran made the river in less than five minutes. The first of the Border Patrol helos were closing in on the burning pyre of the amphibian further up the slope. The ground troops wouldn't be far behind.