True Faith and Allegiance

The YPJ below cheered, she could see them on her screen, and then they began engaging another dark recess, this one on a building on the east side of the street. Oakley and Davenport both could see the dust and concrete kicking off the hole in the side of the wall.

Oakley said, “They are marking targets for you, ma’am.”

“Got it,” she said. “Engaging.”

She pressed the fire button on her cyclic and sent ten more rounds into the hole. Again the women 1,200 feet below raised their hands and waved at the helo above.

“They’ve got the idea!” Oakley said.

Carrie Ann had trouble getting her shells into a third target, a wrecked building under a collapsed rooftop parking lot. She could even see flashes of sniper fire coming out through the darkness, but whoever was shooting in there must have been a hundred feet or more back under the building, and from her elevation she hadn’t been able to reach the sniper.

She had Oakley descend at the north end of the street, and they set up a rocket run just above rooftop level. He slaved her crosshairs to his, flew a steady heading on her target designation, and picked up speed.

Only five hundred yards from the target, Carrie Ann launched rockets right into the deep, cavelike hide of the sniper. The rockets broke apart a couple hundred yards in front of the Apache, and released 650 flechette rounds, tungsten darts that raced forward into the wreckage and destroyed everything in their path, creating a shock wave that collapsed the rest of the structure.

“Good hit,” Oakley said, and then he pulled the nose of his Apache up and began climbing over the town.

Just on the other side of the buildings to the south of the YPJ, they flew over a medium-sized town-square area, with a mosque at its southern end. Oakley was just about to turn to head back to continue the cover for the YPJ, when Captain Davenport’s voice came over the intercom.

“Shit!” Carrie Ann said. “ZPU!” The ZPU was a 14.5-millimeter Soviet-era antiaircraft weapon that could fire six hundred rounds a minute.

As soon as the words left her mouth, big fast-moving tracer rounds painted the sky in front of them, just over the square.

“Hang on!” Oakley pulled Pyro 1–1 over his right shoulder, lifting it and flipping it, turning the armored belly into the threat. Carrie Ann grabbed the handles above her but still her body was pulled tight in her harness.

While their seats were all but bulletproof from below, anything that hit above shoulder height might get through if it was more powerful than a fifty-caliber round, and both Oakley and Davenport were always aware that a lucky shot on the tail rotor, forty feet behind where Davenport sat over the nose of the aircraft, could send them both spinning to their deaths.

He jinked left and right while he increased speed to 185 knots, and they raced out of the line of sight on the weapon.

They headed north back over the street, and saw the YPJ women were on their feet for the first time since the Apache arrived. They were slowly moving to the south.

Davenport said, “Holy crap, Oak. That was close.”

Oakley confirmed: “Yeah, did you see the gun emplacement?”

“Affirmative. The way it was positioned in that square between all those high buildings around means we’d have to get right on top of it again to take it out. Better we call for a fast mover.”

Carrie Ann radioed the JOC and requested an aircraft with Hellfires or bombs be sent to destroy the enemy gun emplacement. An F/A-18 could launch from twenty thousand feet, well above the range of the ZPU, while Pyro 1–1 had to fly a few thousand feet directly overhead to see it in the rubble of the town.

While they waited for an answer, Carrie Ann found another two-man ISIS sniper team in her TADS. It was half a block beyond where the YPJ were moving, and Oakley set up a run-in on her targeting point. She fired four rockets, launching thousands of flechette rounds at a half-collapsed building with three levels of dark recesses. This time they banked as soon as they fired, keeping themselves far away from the mosque and the square with the Russian antiair weapon.

On their next pass the camera showed the sniper position, and it was obvious that the two men there had been torn into tiny pieces.

“Delta Hotel,” Oakley said. Direct Hit.

Just then the JOC came back over the net. “Negative on the fast movers, Pyro One-One. No resources available.”

Carrie Ann acknowledged the transmission, then spoke just for the benefit of her cockpit intercom. “These YPJ below us aren’t getting much help.”

“They’re getting us. You know we can leave that ZPU, but that weapon can be fired down a street just as easily as it can be fired at us. Those women will walk into that square within twenty minutes from now, and they will get nailed.”

Carrie Ann thought it over. “Let’s do a run-in from the south, circle the whole town at low level so no spotters can figure out what we’re doing. We can try to hit that gun from behind.”

“Hellfire?”