SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Mick brought the HIP around so he could watch. The HIND was an ungainly aircraft for a gunship, way too big and heavy to be maneuverable on the battlefield the way, say MH6 Little Birds, Apaches, or even Cobras were able to pop up, shoot, and dart away. Well, the damn thing weighed twenty-two-thousand-plus pounds at takeoff — almost three tons more than the American Apache tank-killer. And its avionics were no more advanced than the HIP’s sluggish controls. Hell, Mick could outmaneuver a HIND even in one of SOAR’s big double-rotored MH-47E Chinooks. But he couldn’t outrun one. HINDs were fast. And deadly. It had that four-barrel Gatling-type gun in its nose. And under its stubby, downswept wings — which provided the craft with more than a quarter of its lift during forward flight — were four pods, each holding twenty 80mm rockets. On the HIND’s wingtips, two missile rails each held what looked like two of the old Soviet AT-3 “Sagger” antiarmor missiles. Mick turned to the spook next to him and shouted, “Watch.”

The HIND lined up on the road again. Sam could see the IMU guerrillas scattering, running into the scrub grass, trying to find cover. Half a dozen of them were carrying loaded RPG launchers. But he knew the rocket grenades would be useless against the gunship unless it was hovering. From about twelve hundred yards, the HIND fired one of its Saggers. The last truck in the convoy was vaporized in a bright yellow-red ball of fire.

The HIND kept coming. Eight hundred yards out, the gunship loosed a barrage of rockets that exploded wide of the road, sending shrapnel into the fleeing Uzbeks. The ugly chopper dropped to a hundred feet, its Gatling gun chewing the roadbed, making furrows, cutting the convoy and the terrorists to pieces.

Its strafing run completed, the HIND veered away to port, pulled up in an unexpectedly gentle climb, and turned into the sun. Sam watched as an Uzbek crawled out from under a truck, pulled himself to his feet, and emptied his AK ineffectively at the HIND’s armored belly. Mick eased the HIP over the smoldering convoy and Sam felt the aircraft shudder as Gino opened up with their own machine gun and cut the guerrilla in two.

“Jeezus H—” From nowhere, four rockets bracketed the HIP, streaked past, and exploded on the desert floor. Sam managed to choke out, “Didja see that?” And then he succumbed, turning ad nauseam green as Mickey D threw the HIP into a tight climb, rolled to the left, dropped, twisted, revolved, then climbed, leaving the spook’s stomach somewhere far behind.

“Hang on, Sloopy,” the pilot screamed. “The sons of bitches just figured out we ain’t with them.” Mick muscled the big chopper almost ninety degrees onto its right side, throttled full, and twisted the aircraft in the second eardrum-popping, breath-stopping, gravity-defying move in less than fifteen seconds, leaving Sam feeling as if he’d just put in a couple of hours of hard time on one of the ride-and-pukes at King’s Dominion.

27

144 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.

0921 Hours Local Time.

Mike Ritzik got the hint they’d been unmasked when he found himself suspended completely outside the open doorway, separated from the ground by a worn, two-inch-wide canvas strap and a carabiner that had probably been made by prison labor in Shenyang. The shock of the violent evasive move pulled the AK out of his hands and he watched it disappear between his legs. He looked down and saw the ground directly below his feet. Then the HIP rolled again and he was yo-yo’d back inside the cabin and smacked rudely onto the deck face first.

He took hold of the door-frame support to keep himself inside just in case Mickey D decided to try crazy eights again, then craned his neck to make sure Ty and Gino were still among the living. The sniper was walking on his knees, his arms wrapped protectively around the HK, heading for someplace he could strap the weapon down. Gene Shepard was working frantically to secure the machine gun’s pintle arm.

Ritzik’s eyes scanned the cabin. He saw the RPG rockets tied down aft, pulled himself more or less upright, detached from the bulkhead, quickly secured the safety harness to the overhead rail with the carabiner, and lurched aft toward the grenade launcher, only to be swept off his feet as Mickey D dropped the HIP’s nose and began to slalom the chopper wildly toward the ground. Ritzik slid forward a yard and a half, finally coming to rest against the cockpit bulkhead.

0921:21. “Help me find him, Sam — help me find him.” Mick had lost the HIND somewhere behind them. He was vulnerable. No place to be. He gave the HIP all the throttle it could stand and started an evasive sequence that took them in a clockwise corkscrew at about a sixty-eight-degree angle, followed by a rapid climb and an outward turn, followed by a series of quick, veering, downward maneuvers that brought him back over the IMU convoy at a height of about thirty feet.