or the
Apaches to trust raying its blades. Then the pilot came back in a lower
sweep which carried him only yards above the smoldering brush, on a
level with the snipers.

Travis pressed the button on the barrel, his target the fast-whirling
blades. Momentum carried the helicopter on, but at least one of the
marksmen, if not all three, had scored. The machine plowed through the
smoke to crack up beyond.

Was their caller working, bringing in the Mongols to aid the Reds
trapped in the wreck?

Travis watched Menlik make his way toward the machine, reach the cracked
cover of the cockpit. But in the shaman's hand was a bare blade on which
the sun glinted. The Mongol wrenched open the sprung door, thrust inward
with the tulwar, and the howl of triumph he voiced was as worldless and
wild as a wolf's.

More Mongols flooding down ... Hulagur ... a woman ... centering on the
helicopter. This time a spear plunged into the interior of the broken
flyer. Payment was being extracted for long slavery.

The Apaches dropped from the heights, waiting for Menlik to leave the
wild scene. Hulagur had dragged out the body of the helmeted man and
the Mongols were stripping off his equipment, smashing it with rocks,
still howling their war cry. But the shaman came to the dying smudge
fire to meet the Apaches.

He was smiling, his upper lip raised in a curve suggesting the victory
purr of a snow tiger. And he saluted with one hand.

"There are two who will not trap men again! We believe you now, _andas_,
comrades of battle, when you say you can go up against their fort and
make it as nothing!"

Hulagur came up behind the shaman, a modern automatic in his hand. He
tossed the weapon into the air, caught it again, laughing--disclaiming
something in his own language.

"From the serpents we take two fangs," Menlik translated. "These weapons
may not be as dangerous as yours, but they can bite deeper, quicker, and
with more force than our arrows."

It did not take the Mongols long to strip the helicopter and the Reds of
what they could use, deliberately smashing all the other equipment which
had survived the wreck. They had accomplished one important move: The
link between the southbound exploring party and the Red headquarters--if
that was the role the helicopter had played--was now gone. And the
"eyes" operating over the open territory of the plains had ceased to
exist. The attacking war party could move against the ship near the Red
s