SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Except this time Mickey D had suckered the HIND broadside to the IMU missile launcher. Broadside meant that the gunship’s jet exhausts, located amidships, just forward and above the chopper’s stubby wings, were now exposed to the missile’s sensors. And just like scissors cut paper but rock breaks scissors, the fat, round, hotter-than-hot exhaust from twin Isotov TV-3-117 turbines trumps chaff every single time in the missile-sensor playbook.

Frankly, Mick didn’t give a rusty F-word whether the IMU was firing an ancient Soviet SA-7, or a newer Strela-2, or a stolen Chinese HN-5. All he knew was that every one of those missiles was an old-fashioned heat-seeker. To work properly, they required a heat source — the exhaust — to lock on to, and a minimum range of five hundred meters for the fired missile to arm itself. Which, Mick noted with satisfaction, was just about what the HIND pilot had allowed, intent as he was on blowing the crap out of the HIP.

Because the HIND was so low, the missile’s flight time was less than one-two-three seconds. Which was when the contact fuse of the kilo-and-a-half high-explosive warhead grazed the exhaust vent and the rocket detonated just inside. There was a brief, explosive hiccup as the engines disintegrated. A violent blast jerked the HIND onto its side. A millisecond later there was another flash, which broke the chopper in two. Rotors shattering, the gunship’s front end cartwheeled, then dropped stonelike onto the desert floor, bursting into a huge fireball that was immediately enveloped in a funnel-shaped cloud of thick, black smoke.

From the starboard doorway, Ritzik saw the dark plume and then a series of vivid white-and-orange explosions as the chopper’s rockets blew up.

Then it was all wiped from his field of vision as Mick rotated the HIP clockwise and accelerated, flying low to keep the dunes between them and the IMU as the pilot headed due west. The Chinese were still out there — prowling and growling. Ritzik had to get his people out before the PLA chopped them all to bits.

28

125 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.

0943 Hours Local Time.

Ten hundred fifteen hours. That was the cutoff Rowdy Yates had set for himself. If Ritzik wasn’t back, they’d get the hell out of Dodge and head for the Tajik border. But now there was a chopper in the area. He heard the thud-thud-thudding as rotor sound bounced off the rocky terrain. Friend or foe? It didn’t matter. They’d stay under cover until he knew for sure. If things had been perfect, he’d have received an intel dump from Dodger or Marko at the TOC. But Almaty was off the air. The frigging radios were still fried. He couldn’t reach Ritzik. There was even static when he broadcast to Doc, Goose, Curtis, and the rest of the Delta element, who lay no more than a hundred and fifty yards away, direct line of sight, on the opposite ridge.

The radios, Rowdy thought, were indicative of the problems faced by people like him, who risked their lives using equipment designed and built by idiots. Just once, Rowdy thought, it would be nice to go into battle with gear that had been designed by people who’d actually put their hides on the line with it, instead of engineers who test everything in a vacuum. His hand brushed the pommel of the ten-inch bowie knife suspended on his combat harness. Rowdy’s bowie had never failed him. But then, it hadn’t been designed by some shirtwaist marketing expert or a self-styled expert with a Ph.D. in edged-weapons design, but by actual Warriors — the Bowie brothers — who knew what a fighting knife should be because they’d had ample opportunity to field-test the design under the full range of combat conditions back in the early days of the nineteenth century.

0944. Rowdy looked down from his perch on the ridge and prayed the God of War was looking down upon him and his troops with favor, and would bless their violence of action. The work had been done. He’d siphoned all the fuel he could out of the HIP before they’d blown the chopper up. He’d secreted the fuel bladder where it wouldn’t be hit if they were attacked. He, Doc Masland, and Bill Sandman had muscled the plutonium core out of the MADM after Wei-Liu had gizmo’d it and pronounced it safe to move. Then they’d carried the nuclear material six hundred yards east and cached it where it would be safe from stray fire. When plutonium burns it can emit deadly alpha rays — and Rowdy wanted the damn stuff nowhere close by. Then he’d packed water, fuel, and some ammo in the 4x4 so they could make their run for it if Ritzik and the rest of them didn’t make it back.