Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [132]
The Americans had launched two Stinger missiles at the incoming 747.
The missiles streaked upwards from the Great Pyramid, shooming toward the inbound jumbo jet, but Pooh Bear nullified them both—he got one missile to lock onto a chaff bomb, and the other he destroyed with an interceptor missile of his own, a French-made FV-5X Hummingbird, designed by the French in the 1990s for the Iraqi Army, specifically to nullify American Stinger missiles. When West had found the Halicarnassus, it had been fitted with ten brand-new Hummingbirds.
The Americans then started firing their anti-aircraft guns from their cranes.
Tracer bullets raced up into the sky—there were so many they filled the sky—but Sky Monster banked the Halicarnassus brilliantly, avoiding the laser-like streaks while at the same time Pooh Bear returned fire and unleashed a Hellfire air-to-ground missile of his own.
The Hellfire shoomed out from a pod on the Hali’s underbelly and spiralled down towards one of the American cranes and—
—smashed into it and detonated.
The crane’s basket was blasted into a million pieces, its occupants and their weapons vaporised.
Judah and all the others on the platform spun at the nearby explosion.
The other crane continued to fire up at the incoming Halicarnassus, unleashing a thousand rounds of AA ammunition and another Stinger missile—which Pooh Bear just blasted out of the sky a moment later.
Then Sky Monster yelled, ‘Pooh! Hang on, buddy! Here we go!’ Then to himself he whispered, ‘Please God, Wizard, tell me you got this right. . . ’
It was then that, roaring down toward the Giza Plateau like an out-of-control missile, Sky Monster lifted the Hali’s nose up slightly and jammed all his thrusters back . . . throwing the Halicarnassus into a deliberate stall . . . so that now it looked like a stallion rearing up on its hind legs, its nose up, its tail down. . .
. . . at which point, Sky Monster held his breath and punched the second collective on his console, a thruster-collective marked: RETROGRADE THRUST SYSTEM.
What happened next startled everyone on the Pyramid’s summit— everyone except Wizard.
The Halicarnassus—dropping through the sky in a graceful flat stall, nose up, tail down—emitted a noise deeper and louder than a thousand thunderbooms.
BOOOOOOOOM!
The colossal noise came from the eight Mark 3 Harrier retrograde thrust engines that had been incorporated into its armoured fuselage.
By Wizard.
The result was sensational: the massive all-black Halicarnassus stopped in mid-fall, as if it were suspended from giant descender cables, and to the sound of its deafening retrograde thrusters, it swung into a perfect hover, 200 metres off the ground and only a few hundred yards from the Great Pyramid!
Sky Monster brought her closer, bringing the big hovering plane’s left forward door alongside the platform on the summit of the Pyramid.
It was an absolutely astonishing sight—the massive black jumbo jet, bristling with guns and missile pods, hovering with its nose close to the summit of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
From the platform itself, the Halicarnassus loomed large, super-huge, like an angry bird-god descended from Heaven itself to wreak its fury.
The initial spell broken, the surviving American crane swung around to unleash a new burst of AA fire, now from point-blank range.
But Pooh Bear, on the Hali’s left wing, was quicker on the draw and also at point-blank range.
He loosed a withering burst of fire—a hyper-fast barrage of gunfire—that shook, shattered and blasted apart the crane, turning its occupants into fountains of spraying blood and the crane into Swiss cheese.
On the platform, Judah’s eyes boggled.
He checked the Sun, checked his watch: 11:59:29.
Thirty seconds.
‘Hold them off!’ he called to his men. ‘Hold them off! We only need thirty seconds!’
Consumed with the spectacular arrival of the Halicarnassus, Judah never noticed a second airborne craft zeroing in