SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Rowdy shifted focus. The door gunner was back at his post. He was dressed in Chinese Special Ops BDUs: olive-drab shirt over dappled, camouflage trousers. Unlike the Delta shooters, he wore no body armor. In his peripheral vision, Rowdy caught the door gunner in Chopper One dropping a ladder as the big craft hovered five yards above the ravine floor. But his focus remained steady on the second aircraft. He chewed the droopy corner of his mustache, happy with the way he’d positioned his people. The choppers had to descend below the ridgeline, which made it harder for them to take evasive action because they were walled in by Mother Nature. Meanwhile, Rowdy and his people held the high ground.

Rowdy checked the spooks and saw that they were ready. “Sun-Tzu says there are six terrains to be considered when setting the location of battle,” he said, looking in Kaz’s direction. “On steep terrain, the first to claim the high positions and the sunny side will be victorious.” He watched as the HIPs eased into the kill zone and then nodded at X-Man. “We’ve got the sunny side up today.”

The Chinese troops — those who actually made it onto the ground alive — would be forced to move uphill toward them, with very little cover and no concealment. Rowdy looked toward Sam Phillips. “The contour of the land is of great help to the victorious army if the general knows how to use it to his advantage. Remember that, Sam I am.”

Rowdy’s right hand settled around the trigger grip; his left hand held the front-heavy launcher steady. He followed the target as it approached. Rowdy liked the RPG. It was lightweight — the launcher and four rockets weighed less than forty pounds. Much more man-portable than a Carl Gustav or the old Italian Folgore. Sure, it wasn’t as accurate as either one. But at close quarters, which is all Rowdy worried about, it was deadly. Most of all, it was simple. And there were so many of them floating around that there was virtually nowhere on earth you went that you couldn’t obtain one. More to the point, since your adversaries almost certainly carried RPGs just like you did, you could kill them and come away with extra rounds. That, certainly, had been his experience in Mogadishu and Kosovo, Colombia, the Philippines, Lebanon, and northern Iraq.

He fixed the big exhaust of the chopper’s turbo engine in his sight. The bird was dropping slowly, slowly, now just fifteen feet off the road. The bottom of the ladder began to drag. A Chinese trooper, weapon slung over his back, swung out and clambered down, fighting the prop wash, the ground-effect vibration, and the ladder itself.

The son of a bitch almost fell as he caught a leg. Then he recovered, pulled himself up, got his leg free, and continued down two dozen rungs onto the road. He waved at the hatchway, then grabbed the ladder to stabilize it.

Rowdy waited until there were two men on the ladder. He saw the copilot’s face, looking down and back, anxiously, as the soldiers descended. His eyes shifted to the door gunner. And then he lowered the sight picture slightly, and squeezed the RPG’s trigger.

That action ignited a powder charge, which ejected the grenade from the launcher with a loud explosive ka-boom at 84 meters per second. Rowdy was careful to watch as the round flew away, to make sure that all four of the stabilizing fins had deployed. If one of them hadn’t, the damn thing could cartwheel, reverse course, and come back to bite him on the ass. He knew that 5 meters — six one-hundredths of a second — after it left the muzzle, the grenade warhead had armed itself. After 11 meters — thirteen one-hundredths of a second — the sustainer rocket fired with a loud shrieeek. There was a huge flash, and the rocket accelerated to its full velocity: 294 meters a second.

Chopper Two was less than eighty meters from where Rowdy lay. It took less than a third of a second— .2721 of a second to be precise — for the rocket’s Piezo-electric fuse to crush against the interior of the choppers starboard-side interior wall, igniting the 94 percent RDX high-explosive warhead.

The explosion blew the minigunner clear out of the aircraft. Rowdy could see wounded Chinese tossing themselves about inside the fuselage. The aircraft stuttered — maybe shrapnel had hit the hydraulics or guidance systems. It didn’t matter. Either way, the pilots had to fight like hell to bring the chopper under control.

But Rowdy wasn’t watching anymore. His attention had moved on to the second threat — the soldiers on the ground. He screamed, “C’mon, assholes — get the sons of bitches,” at the spooks, who shook themselves out of whatever Langley-influenced stupor they were in and began to lay down a stream of suppressive fire at the Chinese troops.

And then Rowdy was reloading, quickly but firmly jabbing a second rocket into the blunderbuss muzzle of the launcher, bringing the weapon up onto his shoulder, and aligning his sight picture. The process took him less than seven seconds.