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"Get out," he yelled4 at Sarah, and she jumped down and ran to the aircraft. 4;ally-A
On the cab, Tungata fired a last burst with the heavy machine-gun.
The first three par as were down, their green parachutes rolling softly in front of the light breeze, and Tungata's bullets kicked dust amongst them. Craig saw one of the par as fall and drag away loose and lifeless on his shrouds. Craig grabbed the AK 47 and the bag of spare ammunition and shouted, "Let's go, Sam. Let's go!" They ran to the Cessna, and Tungata, weak and sick, fell at the steps, and Craig had to drag him to his feet and shove him up.
Sally-A
Tungata fell into the back seat beside Sarah, and Craig jumped up and got a hold. Though he was hampered by the AK rifle and bag, he dragged himself into the front seat beside Sally-A
"Get the door closed!" Sally' A
When he looked up, he saw paratroopers sprinting forward from the edge of the strip to intercept the Cessna.
It did not need the shiny general's star on the front of his helmet to identify Peter Fungabera. The set of his shoulders, the way he carried his head, and the fluid catlike grace of his run were all distinctive. His men were spread out be hind him they were almost directly ahead of the Cessna, only four or five hundred paces ahead.
Sally-A
"Oh mother!" Sally-A
Machine-gun fire came in through the floor of the cabin and tore out through the thin metal roof so that the interior was filled with a gale of swirling wind as the slipstream found the holes.
In the back seat,. Sarah cried out, and the body of the machine was racked and jarred by the storm of AK 47 bullets. Craig felt the seat under him jump as bullets smacked into the metal frame. jagged punctures appeared miraculously in the wing roots just outside his window.
Sally-A
The wild dive towards the earth had pushed their speed way up, so that Sally-A
It was a morula, ninety feet tall.
Sally-A
She kept at ground level, her undercarriage brushing the tops of the maize plants in the open fields, glancing up in the rear-view mirror above her head to keep the morula tree exactly behind the Cessna's tail, blanketing the paratroopers" field of fire.
"Where is the Dakota?" Craig asked, raising his voice above the rush of wind through the cabin.
"It's going in to land," Tungata called, and, twisting in his seat, Craig had a glimpse of the big grey machine going in low over the tree-tops behind them, lined up for the airstrip.
"I can't get the undercarriage up." Sally-A
"Can't seeP Sally-A
"We've got no instruments," Craig checked the shattered panel. "Airspeed's gone, rate of climb, artificial horizon, altimeter, gyro compass-"
"The undercarriage-" Sally-A
"Too much drag, it will cut down our range we'll never make it back!" She was still climbing, but gradually starting to come around onto her course, using the compass in its glass oil bath above her head, when the engine stuttered, almost cut and then surged again in full power.
Quickly Sally-A
"That sounded like fuel starvation," she whispered. "They must have hit a fuel line." She switched the fuel-tank selector cock from 'starboard" to "both" and then glanced up at Craig and gri