Predator ship self-destruct

  Schaefer fell forward onto the ground, half in a swoon as he stared at the incredible sight. The whirring sound from the ship grew to a feverishly high ear-splitting pitch, and the whole craft began to tremble and quiver as if it too would explode. But by now Schaefer could no longer tell if he was conscious or unconscious. He wasn’t sure any more if he was still in one piece himself.

  Two attack helicopters’ blades slapped the thick jungle air as they powered their way through the canyon, racing along at treetop height. The first carried a VIP crew. Its leader, General Phillips, turned to his most important passenger, the rebel Anna Gonsalves.

  “Does this look familiar?” he demanded, pointing to the snaking river below.

  She peered down at the dimly lit tangle of jungle and rushing water and the bramble-covered ridge. Then she saw the huge mahogany log lying beached against the shore—the log on which she and Schaefer and Ramirez had crossed the churning rapids. “Yes . . . yes!” she said, nodding enthusiastically. “Right down there,” And she pointed to the rocky ridge, “That’s where I saw him last.”

  Phillips turned to the pilot. “Follow that ridge,” he ordered. As the pilot tried to oblige, maneuvering quickly in the canyon updrafts, his instrument panel went wild, the gauges spinning, digital readouts out of control. The pilot lurched forward over the steering lever, desperately fighting to regain their equilibrium.

At the same moment the chopper went out of control, the alien’s ship had reached a loud deafening whine, and the ground in the clearing around it began to quake, Schaefer, realizing even in his half-stupor that the thing was going to explode, ignored his knifing pains and ran desperately for the jungle, seeking cover. He sprinted to the edge of the clearing and dived over the embankment just as a blinding purple flash blew the ship to pieces. Fragments of the rare interplanetary metals shot hundreds of feet into the sky. A half mile away the choppers were enveloped in the flash of intense light and momentarily helpless. The aftershock pulsed through the sky like a sonic boom, knocking the choppers haywire as they floundered two hundred feet in the air.

Below, concentric waves of energy pulsed outward from the center of the blast as if a miniature star were being born.

Then, just at the moment when they would have dropped like birds with broken wings to the trees below, the choppers’ mechanisms returned to normal function as the sonic wave subsided. The pilots were just able to pull up in time to prevent crashdown.

“Holy mother o’ Jesus!” Phillips’s pilot exclaimed.

  The general was shaken and totally bewildered by the bomb blast, but he had to stay in charge. He knew something extraordinary had just happened and that it was beyond the soldiering techniques of the guerrillas or even his own beloved army. “Orbit right,” he ordered. “Check out ground zero!”

  The pilot leveled the craft and headed across the treetops toward the source of the blast, now rolling with smoke as several trees went up like fireballs.

  Meanwhile, Schaefer cautiously lifted his head from the ground where he’d flattened himself in the dirt for protection. He stared at the devastation with a curious dispassion. The entire area was deadened—every leaf, every tree, every living thing within fifty feet of the ship was black and charred, stripped down to a pulp of smoldering wood and naked dirt. And everything was coated with a fine sifting of white ash, like fallout after a nuclear blast. At the center site of the ship itself magnesium flares still burned with exotic colors, like some weird carnival at the end of the world. Schaefer rose up from his depression and stared hollow-eyed. Behind him the sound of choppers grew louder as the two craft flared over the trees, but the major didn’t appear to notice.

  The crews gaped at the devastation as they approached slowly, their eyes struggling to penetrate the dense white smoke. As one descended the other hovered a hundred feet above. As the first drew closer to the ground its propwash created a whirling storm of while dust. As they hovered about twenty feet over the annihilated landscape and some of the dust blew off, they beheld a figure materialize from the raging smoke and ash, a naked body covered head to toe in mud, blood, and soot. It was Schaefer, but looking for all the world as if he were the alien.

   The Predator (1987 novelization), chapter 16