Chapter 27

I had given up trying to find any Leptoceratops until the ultra-lite airplanes were ready. Amy had found motors and the Saunders had worked like the proverbial Trojans to have the planes ready by the time the monsoon was over. Ed Samuals had done a great job of producing four propellers carved from wood, the Izods had done well in adapting radios to the planes, and Bill had come up with some very potent rockets for armaments.

Each plane was also armed with two AK-47s fired as fixed machine guns aligned with the nose of the plane. We didn't know how much good they would do, but John remembered the mistake made with the F-4 Phantom in Viet Nam, so we put guns on the planes until we knew by experience that we would not need them. We were concerned about potential attack from any one of several types of pterosaurs (pterodactyls), so we wanted the planes to have some sort of protection. There would be no way of knowing if it would be effective, or even needed, until they weathered the first attack. Like any fighter pilots, the Saunders family was not really worried—they were sure that they could out fly anything in the air. I hoped that they were right.

We had to wait until the ground dried enough before we could try for a test flight. None of us wanted to take a chance with a muddy landing strip. We were afraid that the planes would flip over when they landed from a wheel getting stuck in the mud. That meant that we had time to plant the farm before the big event. Angie was happy that way, since the farm was her "reason for being."

Cindy made the first flight since she weighed the least of the four Saunders. The rationale was that the lighter weight would make a softer landing if something went wrong. I wouldn't know, I was no pilot. She took off and flew a couple of loops of Village #1 to the cheers of everybody on the ground. She landed and made a few minor adjustments before taking off again. This time she tried a few dives and climbs. At one point, she looked like she was going to try for a vertical loop, but her father shouted into the microphone, "DON'T YOU DARE!" She rolled out and landed with a sheepish grin.

The same adjustments were made to the other three planes and they all took off. They seemed to be having so much fun that I think that they never would have come back if some pterosaurs had not shown up in the distance and the planes were still unarmed. After that, they never took off except in pairs and never without full armament. All four diligently practiced with their guns and rockets; Ed and the two girls got to be quite good, but it looked to me like Juliette didn't take it seriously enough.

That attitude didn't last long! All four planes were on a wide sweep looking for Leptoceratops one day when they were attacked by a monster pterosaur, a Quetzalcoatlus. The beast was huge! It had a 40-45-foot wingspan and an even longer body. Its food was fish, so it probably was protecting its territory, rather than expecting to eat the humans or their airplanes. This particular leg of the search pattern had simply come too near a large body of water; otherwise they never would have run afoul of the Quetzalcoatlus.

Initially, the Quetzalcoatlus had made a flyby to inspect the intruders. It didn't like whatever it was that it saw, because it made a looping turn and flew at Sandra from her "4 o'clock". Sandra was not able to turn quickly enough to bring any of her weapons to bear, so she turned as sharply as she could to her right, hoping, eventually, to bring her guns to bear.

Cindy, who was flying wing position, saw Sandra's plight and yelled for help over her radio while she made a diving run at the Quetzalcoatlus. As soon as she was close enough, Cindy began shooting, but the bullets simply passed through the wing of the beast without doing more than punching small holes.

Ed was far enough away that he took a few minutes to come close enough to have a shot at the Quetzalcoatlus. He had heard how useless the bullets were against the giant animal, so he lined up for a rocket attack. Ed had climbed above the target and dove at it, trying to get as much surface area to shoot at as he could manage. He had been pretty good with hitting the stationary targets in practice, but this moving target was another story. Ed fired one of his rockets and it missed to the rear of the massive wing. He was moving so fast that he was passed the Quetzalcoatlus before he could fire his second rocket.

Juliette was his wingman, so she was following Ed in his dive. She was having a hell of a time bringing her rockets to bear and she fired too soon. As a result, she missed well to the left of the Quetzalcoatlus. She dove passed the animal and now regretted not having tried hard enough in practice.

By this time, Sandra had pulled around far enough to get in her own shot. Unfortunately, she was too far away. Her rocket hit the Quetzalcoatlus, but the rocket had slowed down too much for the impact on the contact fuse to ignite, so the rocket fell harmlessly to the ground.

Cindy had climbed above the Quetzalcoatlus and had turned into a dive that brought her suicidally close to the beast. She waited and waited as she got closer and closer before firing while everybody else was shouting over the radio, "SHOOT! SHOOT!" Fortunately, she was in the Quetzalcoatlus' blind spot so it was not trying to evade her attack. Cindy held her breath and bit her tongue to help her aim as she finally fired the rocket. It was a perfect shot! The rocket hit the Quetzalcoatlus on its backbone between the two wings and simply folded the giant in half. There was no way to tell if the beast was killed by the blast of the rocket warhead or by the long fall, but it had to be dead as the result of one or the other.

They regrouped in their formation and continued the mission, still not finding any Leptoceratops. One of the first things they asked for was more rockets on their airplanes. The jury was still out on the AK-47s; they might be effective against smaller pterosaurs or on ground targets, but the rockets were what they now believed in. Furthermore, Juliette scheduled more target practice.

Almost every day, the Saunders family flew recon sweeps to try to find Leptosaruses. Where had the damned animals gone? We knew that there had been some around earlier, but no longer could they be found. There was plenty of food, in the form of the ferns that they appeared to prefer, but there were no animals around to eat it.

On the other hand, the carnivores were becoming a real problem. Almost every day, somebody saw at least one of the big T. Rex or J. Rex beasts, and sometimes family groups were seen. The Utahraptors and Velociraptors were often seen, and in larger packs than had ever been seen before. Beautiful Flower suggested that she had seen the same kind of thing happen on her home island when there got to be too many rats. At that point, the hunting animals increased in number to eat the bounty offered by the rat surplus. As soon as they had eaten the rats down to scarcity, the hunters died out, and the cycle repeated. Each leg of the cycle took several years, and we may have been living on the leg of a cycle in which the carnivores were increasing to take advantage of a surplus of herbivores. If so, we could speed the cycle along by killing off as many of the carnivores as we could.

Beautiful Flower was more of a pragmatist than those of us raised in the 20^th and 21^st century. The idea of killing carnivores willy nilly was a real shock to us, but she pointed out that this might become a case of survival. At that point, she won a lot of people over. We decided on a pilot program of killing all of the carnivores that we could find in the immediate vicinity. If that was fruitful, we would consider doing it on a wider basis. A parallel argument was that we were going to have to cut down on the number of carnivores if our population was going to grow safely.

We decided to mount full scale carnivore hunts starting immediately. Anyone not committed to other jobs was asked to join in the hunt. We would make this a "combined operations" venture and include the airplanes in the hunt. Hopefully, this would make it much easier to find the carnivores. While we were about it, we would work on removing the crocodiles, too.