SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

The 4x4 was a quarter mile to the west, on the far side of a narrow S-curve, sixty yards off the road and camouflaged so well that even Rowdy’d had a hard time spotting it from the ridge high above. The group was split in two. Rowdy, Wei-Liu, and the spooks were concealed on the northern ridge under a jagged outcropping, shielded by a small stand of knobby, wind-sheared evergreens and irregular clusters of nasty, thorned, dark green bushes that stood waist-high, crowned by reddish new growth. The rest of the Delta people were spread along the southern ridge. Their fields of fire would mesh right in the area some eighty yards away where the truck, the chopper, and the Chinese bodies lay. Rowdy’d kept one RPG launcher and four rockets. Doc and Goose had the other pair and all the remaining rockets.

The whomp-whomp-whomping of the chopper grew closer. And then the sound altered as Rowdy picked up the high-pitched whine of big twin turbine engines. And then, as the ground began to shake beneath him, he saw the big bird crest a hundred and fifty feet above the southern ridge, veer east, then slow as the pilot spied the battleground below.

He saw the flat, armored, humpbacked dual cockpits. The stubby wings. The nose-mounted Gatling traversing side to side. The rocket pods. Christ, it was a HIND, a hunter-killer gunship.

The chopper rotated to give the pilot a better view of the scene. He descended to fifty feet above the ravine floor, edged closer to the burning HIP, rotated counterclockwise above the bodies of the Chinese soldiers, then maneuvered over the nose of the upended truck, passing not a hundred feet to the north of the MADM — although there was no outward indication that the pilot or gunner saw the nuke. What the hell did these guys need — flares? Then the pilot dropped the chopper’s nose slightly, and proceeded to follow the road westward, its rotor wash creating a 360-degree tsunami of dust, stone, and loose brush.

“Everybody stay down … stay down … he’s trying to pick up a scent.” Rowdy released the transmit button, hoping he’d been heard over the chopper’s screaming engines, watching as the HIND picked up speed, climbed a few hundred feet into the air, flew off to the east, then reversed course and backtracked, its armored-glass nose lowered to give the pilot and gunner the widest possible angle of vision.

Rowdy had a sudden urge to smile because this guy wasn’t playing by the rules. Obviously, the Chinese pilot hadn’t been made privy to this particular scenario, which was known in the Joint Forces Command war-game scenario list as “Special Situation Ambush No. 12,” or “SSA-12.” In “SSA-12,” a “Red Force” chopper-borne hostile insertion element sees the bait set out by the “Blue Force” ambushers, lands, and is decimated. And guess what? In ten out of ten SSA-12 war-game simulations, the Red Force chopper always settles right where the Blue Force commander plans the ambush site. That is because at the Joint Forces Command, the outcome of war games is always decided in advance. The red team, known as OPFOR, or Opposing Force, always loses. Which, Rowdy knew, is why JFC war games were totally useless — except as résumé builders for dumb-ass generals.

In real life, as Rowdy knew from bitter experience, the enemy is seldom cooperative. In real life, the situation is always fluid and unpredictable. More to the point, it is always Murphy-rich. The one time Rowdy had been allowed to play the OPFOR bad guy in an SSA-12 scenario, he’d held a pair of chopper gunships back, out of sight of the LZ. When his landing force had been attacked, he’d unleashed the Cobras and decimated the ambushers. Which is when the generals running the exercise had stopped the war game and ordered him to replay the segment so their Blue Force ambushers would win.

The same principle applied here. Once they’d fired on the HIND, the Chinese gunner would know exactly where their positions were — and he could lay down a deadly rain of machine-gun and rocket fire on them from above.

So Rowdy had to hold fire, hoping the HIND would land once the pilot saw the MADM. The HIND’s armor was virtually impervious to RPG and small-arms rounds. Only when it was on the ground — its wide twin exhausts and air intakes vulnerable to intensive RPG and rifle fire — could they immobilize the big gunship.

But Rowdy already knew the HIND wouldn’t land — no more than a tank crew would abandon the safety of its armored cocoon in hostile territory to go examine something. It just wouldn’t happen. No: once the Chinese pilot spotted the MADM, he would do what he had no doubt just done: radio for backup. Send for additional troops and EOD specialists.