Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [87]
On the upper deck, Pooh Bear and West rocked with every swerve, tried to return fire. Pooh spied one of the TOW missile launchers on one Panhard.
‘They’ve got missiles!’ he yelled.
West called, ‘They won’t use them! They can’t risk destroying the Piece!’
‘West!’ Stretch’s voice came over their radios. ‘It’s only a matter of time before they barricade off this road! What do we do?’
‘We drive faster!’ West replied. ‘We have to get to the Charles de Gaulle Bridge—’
Shoom—!
—they blasted out of the tunnel, back into sunlight, just in time to see two French Army helicopters sweep into positions above them.
They were two very different types of chopper: one was a small Gazelle gunship, sleek and fast and bristling with guns and missile pods.
The other was bigger and much scarier: it was a Super Puma troop carrier, the French equivalent of the American Super Stallion. Big and tough, a Super Puma could carry twenty-five fully armed troops.
Which was exactly what this chopper was carrying.
As it flew low over the top of the speeding double-decker bus, along the rising-and-falling roadway on the north bank of the Seine, its side door slid open and drop-ropes were flung from within it—and the French plan became clear.
They were going to storm the bus—the moving bus!
At the same moment, three of the pursuing Panhards swept up alongside the bus, surrounding it.
‘I think we’re screwed already,’ Stretch said flatly.
But he yanked on his steering anyway—ramming hard into the Panhard to his right, forcing it clear off the roadway, right through the low guard-rail fence . . . where it shot high into the air, wheels spinning, and went crashing down into the river with a gigantic splash.
Up on the top deck, West tried to fire at the hovering Super Puma above him, but a withering volley from the Gazelle gunship forced him to dive for the floor. Every single passenger seat on the top deck of the bus was ripped to shreds by the barrage of bullets.
‘Stretch! More swerving, please!’ he yelled, but it was too late.
The first two daredevil French paratroopers from the Super Puma landed with twin thumps on the open top deck of the moving double-decker bus only a few feet in front of him.
They saw West instantly, lying in the aisle between the seats: exposed, done for. They whipped up their guns and pulled the trigg—
—just as the floor beneath them erupted with holes, bullet holes from a shocking burst of fire from somewhere underneath them.
The two French troopers fell, dead, and a moment later, Pooh Bear’s head popped up from the stairwell.
‘Did I get them? Did I get them? Are you okay?’ he said to West.
‘I’m all right,’ West said, hurrying down the stairs to the lower deck. ‘Come on, we’ve gotta get to the Charles de Gaulle Bridge before this bus falls apart!’
The rising-and-falling riverside drive that they were speeding along would normally have been a tourist’s delight: after leaving the Louvre behind, the roadway swooped by the first of the two islands that lie in the middle of the Seine, the Ile de la Cité. Numerous bridges spanning the river rushed by on the right, giving access to the island.
If West’s team continued along the riverside road, they would soon arrive at the Arsenal precinct—the area where the Bastille once stood.
After that came two bridges: the Pont d’Austerlitz and the Pont Charles de Gaulle, the latter of which sat beside the very modern headquarters of the Ministry of Economics, Finances and Industry, which itself sat next-door to the Gare de Lyon, the large train station that serviced south-eastern France with high-speed trains.
The big red tourist bus whipped along the riverside road, weaving through traffic, ramming the pursuing Army cars with wild abandon.
It shot underneath several overpasses and over some raised intersections. At one stage the spectacular Notre Dame Cathedral whizzed by on the right, but this was perhaps the only tourist bus in the world that didn’t care for the sight.
As soon as West had abandoned the upper deck of the bus, the French troops