SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

As they flashed by, Mick heard the ping of rounds on the airframe. He jogged the HIP left, then right. As he pulled past the burning truck that had led the decimated convoy, and swerved violently to his right, a rocket streaked from somewhere behind him on the desert floor.

Damn convoy hadn’t been decimated enough, Mick decided.

Five hundred yards behind Mickey D the HIND wrenched itself out of its attack trajectory, twisted away, released chaff, and pulled hard to starboard at a dangerous angle, flying east, away from the chaff.

The rocket seemed to waver, then veered toward the HIND’s countermeasures and headed west, its trail visible as it cut through the floating, shiny chaff cloud and vanishing into the morning sky.

0921:27. “What the hell was that?” Ritzik pulled himself into the cockpit area.

“Dunno, boss.” Mick jogged the HIP slightly to the south. “SA-7 of some kind. Maybe a Strela. Maybe a Chinese HN-5. Who the hell knows? It was moving too fast.”

“Damn.” That was all they needed. “We’re vulnerable,” Ritzik said. The HIP didn’t carry countermeasures.

“You guys strap in,” Mick said. “Lemme deal with this.”

0921:39. Mick pulled the HIP’s nose up slightly and careened westward, fifteen yards off the desert floor, chest heaving, his eyes scanning for the gunship. He finally caught a glimpse of it at his four o’clock, turning into him, running flat-out balls to the wall, altitude about six hundred feet.

Where the hell had the gunship been hiding? He’d done a frigging three-sixty and still he hadn’t seen the goddamn thing.

0921:43. Mick let the son of a bitch come on. He knew the HIND’s rockets wouldn’t do him any good — not at such an oblique angle. It was the Gatling he had to worry about. The frigging HIND could fire thirty degrees left or right of center. Mick gave himself more throttle and increased the collective pitch, pulling the HIP up vertically, keeping his own craft out of the fatal sixty-degree funnel. The HIND followed.

“C’mon, c’mon, you asshole — try this.” Mick’s eyes narrowed. Suddenly he decelerated, bringing the HDP into a hover. As the HIND flashed past, Mick popped the HIP straight up, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen hundred feet. If the gunship was fully loaded — and it appeared to be — it was virtually incapable of quick stops and hovering.

0921:50. Ritzik, Ty, and Gene Shepard rolled onto their hands and knees as the HIP slowed to a hover just above two thousand feet. Ritzik reached for the troop seat just forward of the port-side doorway and pulled it from its storage position. “You guys better do a Bette Davis,” he croaked.

“Betty who?” Gino Shepard’s words were lost in the chopper noise, but Ritzik understood the first sergeant’s raised shoulders. Ritzik dropped onto the seat and secured the harness.

He shouted, “She’s the one who said, Tasten your seat belts, it’s gonna be a bumpy night.’”

0922:11. Mickey D watched as the HIND arced into a wide turn, then fought for altitude, flying an intercept route that would cut them off from escape. Mick’s eyes scanned the horizon. They were sitting above the road as it came off the desert basin and curved into the foothills. The burning convoy sat to the HIP’s north and west by about two kliks — just over a mile. The nose of the front truck was less than a kilometer from where the desert plain’s lunarlike surface gave way to the sixty-foot dunes and S-curved ravines leading to the two mountain ranges that marked the Chinese-Tajik border. Mick rotated the HIP once in a three-sixty to make sure the second HIND was nowhere in sight. And then he popped the HIP another three thousand feet into the sky. “Your move, asshole.”

The gunship climbed steadily toward the HIP. At eight hundred yards or less, the Gatling was deadly. The rockets had three times that range.

Mick watched as the HIND’s profile grew larger and larger. And then, as it drew within two kilometers, maybe a little more, the gunship loosed two quick quartets of rockets.

Mick dropped the nose of the HIP toward the desert floor, rotated so he faced the HIND, then dropped the chopper in a vertical plunge, as sudden and violent as an elevator whose cable has been sheared off.

The HIP’s airframe protested by buffeting violently. Hell, the damn thing hadn’t been built for aerobatics. Mick literally stood on the pedals to maintain control as the HIP dropped below the eight rockets. His left arm fought to decrease the collective while his right somehow managed to maintain the cyclic pitch in a neutral attitude.

At less than a hundred feet above the deck he adjusted the cyclic pitch and added throttle, dropping the nose slightly and putting the HIP into forward flight. He skimmed above the desert, heading straight for the burning convoy. Above and behind him, the HIND loosed another rocket barrage.