SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

0920:05. Ritzik, strapped securely to a turnbuckle, dangled his legs out the port-side doorway. He peered out and saw the Chinese HIP, pluming smoke, keel over to its right, then fall away, spin out, nose stonelike, two hundred feet to the ground, and explode in a huge fireball, its rotors shattering into shrapnel. Then he lost sight of the burning craft as Mick put their own HIP into a tight, evasive turn, then flattened the aircraft out to make a strafing run at the convoy.

0920:06. Sam screamed, “They don’t know what the hell’s going on. They think they’re taking ground fire.” He swiveled in the copilot’s chair and shouted once again so Ritzik would know what was happening. But his voice was lost in the scream of the engines as Mickey D put the chopper into a tight turn and swooped down toward the IMU trucks.

0920:16. Gene Shepard swung the machine-gun muzzle forward. He was leaning out the HIP’s doorway, the wind slapping at the high collar of his bulletproof vest, the dead Chinese door gunner’s ill-fitting soft helmet jammed on his head, its chin straps flapping wildly in the slipstream. The road was below. Mick had them right where they had to be. Shep strained against his web harness, dropped the muzzle slightly, which put the wide post of the front sight directly in the middle of the road. As soon as his peripheral vision picked up the last boxy truck in the IMU convoy, he flicked the safety up, tightened his finger on the 67’s heavy trigger, and watched as the armor-piercing rounds kicked up gravel in the center of the road at the rate of 650 per minute.

0920:21. Mickey D kept the HIP centered above the convoy, watching the chopper’s shadow as it moved down the road toward the IMU convoy. He adjusted his airspeed; shifted his cyclic stick and pedals, dropping the HIP to fifty feet, so he could come in flat, at about eighty knots. He sensed the dull chatter of Shep’s machine gun, although he had a hard time actually separating it from the other noise.

Besides, there was a more pressing problem to deal with. The HIP was giving him no quarter. It was a cumbersome, awkward helicopter; sluggish, unwieldy, slow to respond — a burro of an aircraft.

Mick thought, And what’s the first step to flying a burro? You use a two-by-four and get its bloody attention. His left hand fought the collective lever. No sooner did he have it under control than the cyclic shaft in his right hand began to stutter. The pedals felt as if they’d been lubed with molasses. He bullied the controls into submission and finally brought the HIP where he wanted it to be, pulled up, swung around, and readied the aircraft for the next run.

0920:24. Sam Phillips pressed the mike against his lips. “Wŏ bŭdŏng. Wŏ bŭdŏng.” Holding his hand over the foam he pushed the mike up over his head and shouted at Mickey D. “They were asking how we’re doing.”

Mick’s head went up and down once. But he couldn’t answer — he was too effing busy trying to stay out of the HIND’s way. The big, hunchbacked gunship had come around behind him and Mick wanted those guns and rockets nowhere near his six. He dropped the HIP’s tail, flared left, and pushed the big transport chopper into the sky as the gunship flashed past.

As it did, Mick caught a glimpse into the HIND’s tandem cockpits. The gunner/copilot occupied the front position, protected by a thick flat pane of armored glass. Above and behind him, separated by heavy armor and more bulletproof glass, sat the pilot. The fuselage door was shut — no sign of a waist gun — so there was probably no third crewman aboard this morning. Give thanks for small blessings. Mick harassed the controls until he’d slowed the HIP and he could see as the HIND yawed right, swerved, and started its shallow dive toward the convoy.

0920:29. Sam heard chatter in his headset — the HIND pilot was talking to him. He flicked the switch on/off, on/off, and repeated his message, trying like hell to sound authentically Mandarin, and knowing in his heart that he was nowhere close.