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Jeremy was the first one in the entire crowd to his feet.
That first bang was too high a frequency for the howitzer. A round from the big gun should have hit him in the gut with a bass note.
It didn’t.
It spiked into his ears as his eyes caught what was happening.
A single thirty-foot blade on the Chinook’s rotor had drooped suddenly.
First it impacted the top of the fuselage, gouging a deep scar across the metal skin, but it didn’t break.
Instead, it was deflected upward, bouncing high enough to spin around cleanly for several revolutions.
Then it dipped again.
The Chinook was dropping its nose toward the runway, but it wasn’t fast enough.
This time, when the blade hit the fuselage, it broke, but it didn’t separate.
Instead it swung around until it slammed into the cockpit,
