SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

He fired again. The round cleared the RPG cleanly. But the chopper dropped precipitously as the pilot tried to keep his aircraft from spinning into the ground.

The HIP began to buffet. The rocket flew over the top of the bird and exploded against the far ravine wall.

Rowdy cursed. Quickly, he stuffed a third rocket — an OG-7 high-explosive fragmentation grenade — into the launcher’s muzzle.

Now the chopper careened to the right, arcing away from him like a clay bird coming out of a skeet house. Teeth clenched, Rowdy swung the grenade launcher around, following the HIP’s trajectory. He forgot about the iron sights. Instead, he let the wide RPG warhead overtake the center of the cockpit, almost as if he were swinging a big, lethal paintbrush. And just as he “painted” the leading side of the chopper’s glassed-in nose with a smooth, even stroke, he pulled the trigger and “Hoo-ah!” remembered to follow through the swing.

22

125 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.

0748 Hours Local Time.

From eighty yards away, Ty Weaver’s 168-grain boat-tail bullet caught HIP One’s pilot in the philtrum — that small indentation between the bottom of the nose and the top of the lip. The shot was catastrophic: the target’s central nervous system was destroyed and he was brain-dead before he even realized he’d been shot. The chopper lurched vertically ten yards. The HIP’s sudden movement shook three Chinese off the rope ladder. They fell hard, twenty-five feet onto the road below. One scrambled away. The other two lay stunned.

The sniper moved the crosshairs of his sight to his left, found his secondary target — the copilot’s throat — and squeezed the trigger. Weaver saw the man’s head snap sideways. Then the HIP corkscrewed to the right and dropped stonelike forty feet, smacking hard onto the roadbed and shearing its port-side tire off.

The chopper bounced once, then twice, crushing the two soldiers who’d fallen from the ladder. Ty squinted through the ten-power scope, and wasn’t happy with what he saw: the copilot in profile, blood oozing from his neck, still alive, working frantically to operate the controls and save his aircraft. The sniper focused again, his pulse steady, his breathing even, his right index finger easing tighter on the trigger.

The HIP dragged itself to clockwise, blades kicking up dust and stones, rotating on its broken landing-gear strut. Ty cursed silently. Now — when he could see at all — what he saw was the profile of the pilot, head thrown back, strapped dead into his seat.

The pitch of the HIP’s rotor blades changed audibly, and their velocity slowed. But the big bird still scraped across the ground. As it came around, Ty’s scope picked up the minigunner. The poor bastard was fighting centrifugal force, trying to hold on but still vainly searching for a target. The sniper tracked the hatchway, led the target slightly, then squeezed the trigger, the rifle muzzle actually following through the shot. The door gunner pitched backward into the cabin and disappeared.

The HIP’s nose smacked up against a boulder. The wounded bird finally came to rest. Ty’s crosshairs settled on the cockpit. He saw the copilot’s hand move on the collective handle. He raised the crosshairs until they found the zygomatic bone, the thin plate covering the brain between the eye and the ear. He eased the sight back, lifting the crosshairs until they touched the tip of the helix — the curled, upper edge of the target’s ear. And then he squeezed the trigger, watching as the copilot’s head disintegrated with the shot.

Ritzik blinked as the HIP ground itself to a halt. He raised himself out of his concealed position. “Mickey—” The pilot had the RPG leveled at the chopper. Why the hell wasn’t he shooting? “Cream the goddamn thing,” he ordered.

But Mickey D obviously had other ideas. “C’mon—” He dropped the RPG. “Ty — give us cover.” He grabbed his AK and charged down the ravine toward the chopper, followed by Doc Masland and Bill Sandman.

Ritzik scrambled after the trio, pistol in hand. He was eight, maybe ten yards behind the other three, still crabbing down the ravine, when a bullet kicked up rock splinters six inches from his right foot. He spun, rolled to his left, and brought the pistol muzzle up.

A Chinese Special Forces soldier, helmet askew, was coming up the hill, firing his rifle from the hip. He shot wildly in Ritzik’s direction, his eyes wide in double-take shock as he spotted Ritzik’s camouflaged but unmistakably Occidental face. The rifle jammed.

The soldier dropped the weapon, reached into a pouch on his chest, and pulled out a grenade. Ritzik head-shot him—tap-tap—just as he was yanking the pin.