Skyfire by Mack Maloney Page A

town.
    "I sounded the alarm, but it couldn't have been more than a few seconds later when the fuel tanks went up. They went right for them. Fired an antitank missile into each one of them. That's when all hell broke loose . . ."
    The only good news was that most of the townspeople weren't even home when the attack came. The vast majority of the residents were over on East Line Beach about ten miles away for the usual Friday night clambake.
    "Our commander took about half our unit over to East Line," the militia sergeant went on. "All we could do was hold them off as long as possible. We shot at a bunch of them down near the docks, but then, with the fire and smoke and all, we had to get the hell out. . ."
    "Did you actually get a close look at any of them?" Hunter asked.
    The men all shrugged. "It was hard to," one of them said. "They were dressed all in black and they moved real quick, like they had done this sort of thing before. But they were wearing funny-looking helmets. And those bugles! Jeesuz, it was like every other guy was blowing his lungs out on one of those things."
    "Well, it's damn quiet in there now," Hunter said, first eyeing the town and then the huge, smoldering crater. "I say we go back in and take a look."
    The four of them rechecked their weapons and then cautiously moved back into the village.

Chapter Eighteen
    It didn't take them long to reconnoiter the devastated seaport.
    There wasn't much left to see. The raiders were long gone and just about every building had been burned to the ground. Anything of any consequential value-cars, trucks, fishing boats, even the village's ice-making machine-had been destroyed. Fortunately, the body count was low. Hunter and the troopers came across only a half dozen corpses during the grim search, all of them civilians.
    After thirty minutes or so, Hunter's small group arrived at the town's beach.
    Several more militia units were already there, as were about a dozen injured civilians. A militia unit officer was also on hand, directing his troopers to go out on the outskirts of the village and find any civilians who might be hiding in the fields and dunes.
    This officer recognized Hunter immediately, and after a brief discussion, showed him the only piece of evidence that could be found as to how the raiders had arrived and departed so quickly. Bringing him to a section of the beach that was bracketed by two breakwater jetties, he pointed to the dozens of bootprints that led in and out of the crashing surf. It was the exact copy of what the investigators up in Nova Scotia had reported.
    "Yet no landing ships were sighted?" Hunter asked the militia commander.
    "Not a one" was the reply. "Even now, if they had 95
    been landed and picked up by troopship, we'd be able to see them."
    Hunter scanned the quickly darkening ocean and saw nothing. No lights, no silhouettes on the horizon. Nothing.
    He quickly told the officer about the RPV and the projectile that had decimated the force of men he'd seen running up the sand dune.
    "We saw it, too," the officer replied, adding that a squad of soldiers dispatched to the scene came back to report that nothing-not even a bone or a piece of clothing-was left of the attackers.
    "Whoever fired that shot did us a favor, whether they had intended to or not,"
    the officer concluded. "It killed one of their parties and scattered the rest of them, I'd say. The problem is, there are probably dozens of these raiders still running around out in the woods beyond town."
    Once again, Hunter gazed out to sea. The projectile, whatever it was, must have been fired from a ship out beyond the horizon, its aim obviously guided by the RPV. Yet there weren't many guns afloat that could fire such a shell with such devastating accuracy at such a long distance.
    And the question remained: Was it fired by a friend or foe?
    Just then, a militia corporal ran up and reported that a medi-vac helicopter was on its way down from the United American Army fort at