Apache

18. THE WRONG WALL

Three minutes and twenty-eight seconds earlier…

Timing the manoeuvre with his usual perfection, Geordie had heaved back hard on his cyclic stick to bring Ugly Five Zero in to land alongside Mathew’s body. Dust billowed ahead of them and rose 100 feet into the air before being sucked back down by his rotors, entirely smothering the Apache. Geordie had flown over 2,000 helicopter hours in his ten years as a pilot and this was the worst brown-out he’d ever been in.

‘I can’t put down in this shit Billy. Ed and Carl won’t see us; they’ll come in straight on top of us.’

‘Well anywhere then. Just get us down.’

‘I’m going into the fort.’

‘You sure?’

‘Just over the wall. It’s another big field; there’s nothing in it.’

‘Copied mate. Do it.’

A quick jerk on the collective and Geordie’s Apache was ascending again. Some left-foot pedal twisted the gunship ninety degrees to the right, then a push on the cyclic and they were over the wall and into the adjacent field; a rectangle, 100 metres long and 200 wide. A line of trees to their right divided it into two squares.

Geordie pressed on a further fifty metres so his next dust cloud wouldn’t blind Ed and Carl. Billy slewed the TADS to the northern end of the field and lined up his crosshairs on the fort’s outer wall.

‘Engaging.’

He squeezed the trigger and the cannon threw twenty rounds into the remnants of the watchtower on the far right. Then he raked another twenty along the top of the wall. Rock splinters and shrapnel span off it in all directions as the rounds exploded. If anyone was near the wall, they weren’t going to put their heads above it in a hurry now. It bought Billy and Geordie thirty extra seconds.

Nick was watching their insertion from 2,000 feet above. He hosed down the entire western wall and the canal path alongside it with consecutive twenty round bursts, to discourage anyone trying to flank round and ambush his friends in Ugly Five Zero.

Geordie landed hard at a forty-degree angle to Jugroom’s main building. Hearn and Robinson jumped off and ran to the wall, as they’d been told to do. The wrong wall.

Geordie watched them disappear into the brown-out and immediately began to worry. ‘Do you think they know where we are now, Billy?’

‘Probably not. They wouldn’t have seen anything on the wing. We could barely see ourselves.’