True Faith and Allegiance

The cannon was accurate to within three meters, good but not perfect, but she could fire ten or twenty rounds at a burst and nail anything she could see with its dual-purpose shells— armor-piercing for light-armor targets, and high explosive as an area weapon.

There was a five-inch-square multipurpose display screen on each side of the central control bank. On these she could choose the TADS, the target acquisition and designation sight, or she could text message with other helos, bring up comms, fuel, and load-out information, or access any of more than 1,500 pages of info in all. A keyboard on the left side of the control bank allowed her to type messages, and even though she wore gloves, she’d gotten as adept at using it as she was at texting on her own cell phone.

Her hands rested on the two video game — like console handholds on either side of her center console, giving her quick access to all her most important controls. She’d been told there were 443 different positions to all the dials, switches, and knobs, and she knew every one of them.

On top of this, she had all the flight controls Oakley had behind her; the cyclic between her knees, the collective by her left knee.

By slaving the weapon to her right eye and looking at the target, she only had to reach down to the cyclic and squeeze the weapon’s release trigger to fire the cannon at whatever she was looking at.

She looked down at the multipurpose screen displaying her target acquisition and designation sight by her right knee, desperately searching for any danger. This gave her access to several cameras in a mobile turret below her. Through the 127-times magnification of the TV camera, she saw an enhanced black-and-white view of whatever she was looking at. Also on the screen she could see crosshairs that showed her where Oakley’s right eye was pointed.

She looked through her thermal view, hoping to pick up human forms in the dark recesses of the bombed-out buildings, but the heat of the day on twisted metal made this a futile task. Sure, they could sit there over the town and she could take her time, but Oak wanted to keep them moving at speed to make it difficult to nail them from below with an RPG, so Carrie Ann just had seconds to scan on any one building, street, or bomb crater.

“Ma’am,” Oakley said, “I’ve got troops, on the road just off our nose. Tucked into the east and west side of the street.”

Davenport looked on the TADS to see Oakley’s crosshairs. She moved her own eye to it and it showed her the 127-times magnification of the street.

There, at least two dozen figures, all with rifles, were shooting at something in a row of buildings to the south.

Oakley increased the magnification. “Chicks. Those are chicks. I didn’t think the Kurdish female soldiers ever got in the fight.”

Davenport said, “The Peshmerga don’t let their females get on the front lines. But YPJ have female units that see combat.”

Oakley asked, “Are we supposed to be helping the YPJ?”

The captain in the front seat just shrugged and said, “We’re helping ourselves if we kill an ISIS sniper. If the Kurdish rebels happen to benefit from our fight, then lucky them.”

“That’s what I like about you, Captain. You can simplify the unsimplifiable.”

“And I like how you make up words, Oak.”

They flew high over the YPJ fighters, who seemed completely pinned down, but even when Oakley circled the entire engagement below counterclockwise, neither he nor Captain Davenport was able to discern any targets. The broken buildings had too many positions from which a sniper could fire, and the recesses were so deep, it would take incredible luck for the Apache above to see anything, even with its TADS.

Oak said, “How about we go down to two thousand. We might get lucky and see somebody popping out to take a shot at us.”

“As low as you need,” came the response.

A minute later they were at 1,200 feet, directly above the YPJ fighters. It appeared even the female rebel unit had stopped receiving fire now, because they just remained hunkered down in groups of three or four along the street.

Oakley said, “Nobody’s shooting at us, or them. Hopefully the YPJ will take the hint and use our presence to back out of here.”

Carrie Ann replied, “Wish we could scare away the bad guys with our presence, but usually they just shoot—”

Just then, a flash came from the third-floor window of a ruined building up the street. While Carrie Ann couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a YPJ fighter, the indicators were good that it was not when the YPJ began firing back and dust kicked up around the concrete window frame.

She slaved her crosshairs to the window. “I’m identifying that as a sniper position. Engaging with cannon.”

A twenty-round burst from the cannon below Carrie Ann’s feet ripped into the window and sent high-explosive thirty-millimeter shells into the sniper’s hide.