and pushed himself to his feet. He managed to walk down the path almost normally, grateful that he had convinced his master to exclude the men from his mental link.
Taggart didn't like to think about what would happen if the Apocalypse Brigade caught the same blood lust which drove the mobs.
"Coming up on River Hill, Admiral," Colonel Dickle announced, and Aston poked his head into the cockpit. The sky above the crouching mountains to the southeast was bloody. "The Herky-birds are right on schedule. Your vehicles will be going in in about one minute."
The ready lights above the hatches lit, and the men of First Platoon, Company T, gathered themselves internally.
Colonel Tyson felt cold satisfaction. It had turned into a race, after all, and First Brigade had won it.
Tentacles of madmen had flooded up I-26, brushing aside the county and state roadblocks, and one rampaging column had curled out for the airport. But the first C-17s had landed twenty minutes before, and his paratroopers had moved into positions selected before leaving Bragg. The rattle of treads had cut through the clamor of the approaching mob as Bradley fighting vehicles and the LPM8 AGS—technically the "Armored Gun System," but for all intents and purposes light tanks—which had finally replaced the old, unsatisfactory Sheridans with which the Eighty-Second had been equipped for decades, headed for the perimeter. They were in their firing positions and the Apache gunships were waiting overhead when the glaring headlights swept down Airport Road.
Tyson wasted no time calling on the mob to surrender. When the first rounds of blind fire spattered his men, they raked the packed civilian vehicles and captured National Guard trucks with a tornado of automatic fire. The Apaches' thirty-millimeter chainguns and the twenty-five-millimeter chainguns and co-ax machine guns of the Bradleys had been particularly effective, he thought grimly, but the high-explosive and white-phosphorous rounds from the M35 105-millimeter main guns of the LPM8s had been even more spectacular.
The bloodied survivors had broken and run, abandoning their dead, and the night sky behind the colonel reverberated with the whine of jet engines as his