True Faith and Allegiance

“Affirm, but we’ll have to get closer than I’d like because I have to laze the weapon.”

“Copy all. It’s going to take four mikes to circle the city. Let’s just hope the YPJ stay put.”

Carrie Ann said, “That’s why I’m not using rockets. Hitting that square from the south will throw flechettes northward up those streets and through any breaks in the buildings. Too much chance of blue on blue.”

They rounded the small town of rubble at an altitude of just two hundred feet, flying as fast as Oak could get his aircraft to go, and with both sets of eyes scanning the sky and the TADS looking for other dangers.

She set up her fire-control system to choose a Hellfire on her right pylon, and she slaved its camera to her MPD by her right knee. For now she just saw the buildings passing by below, but once they got line of sight on the gun, she’d be able to fly it via the camera, right into the target.

Four minutes later they shot at 185 knots over the town from the south. They’d seen the smoke from a couple of rifles shooting at them on their way, but nothing like the ZPU ahead. While Oakley was focused on flying straight and level and fast, Davenport was flashing her eyes between her Hellfire cam and her TADS, looking ahead through the town for the mosque.

Finally she said, “Do you see the minaret?”

“Got it,” Oakley replied with confidence. “Taking you up, then down.”

They climbed quickly, getting more altitude and allowing the Hellfire to fire down into the square, hopefully hitting the ZPU still facing to the north.

Oakley added, “You are going to have to make this work. We’re not going to get another shot at this because they’ll figure out what we’re trying to do.”

“I need six hundred fifty meters’ line of sight to laze the target and put the Hellfire on my tag. Give me six-fifty.”

Oakley climbed to five thousand feet, and then pushed the cyclic forward, sending the nose down. Carrie Ann went weightless, lifting up into her straps, but she kept her finger on her fire button and her eyes on the TADS.

When she saw the square below her she looked to the point where they’d stumbled onto the ZPU fifteen minutes earlier. It was still there, but in the process of turning around.

Oakley said, “They’ve seen us.”

Carrie Ann kept her voice calm. “Press the attack. I’m lazing.” An invisible beam left Pyro 1–1 and shot forward, striking the Russian 14.5-millimeter gun. She pressed the trigger on the cyclic, and a Hellfire dropped off the pylon and launched forward. “Missile away.”

Oakley kept his ship aimed at the wrecked town below, and shot lower and lower, flying behind the much faster Hellfire missile. Davenport had to keep the laser locked on the weapon until the moment of impact, lest the missile lose its acquisition of the target.

The problem was the Apache was flying right into the potential blast radius of the explosion. Oakley would have to wrench the helo hard to keep them from hitting debris once the Hellfire struck.

“Three seconds,” Carrie Ann said. And then, “Impact!”

Oak pulled hard on the collective and banked to the left, all but spinning the fifty-foot-long machine sideways above the square.

The ZPU exploded into thousands of pieces, killing the entire gun crew in the process, Carrie Ann’s gun camera footage would later confirm.

For now, however, the two hot, sweaty, and exhausted helicopter crew left the town, heading back to the north, hoping they’d done enough for the group of female fighters climbing over the broken rubble toward the south and, eventually, toward Mosul.

43

Jack finished reading every single posting related to the username TheSlavnyKid under the subreddit Baltic War at eight-twenty p.m. This included the postings of everyone who responded to something Rechkov wrote, which had brought the number of individual posts somewhere close to two thousand. He had also created a database of all the usernames of those who commented, and dug into a few of the more prevalent personalities, the usernames that showed up with regularity on Rechkov’s postings.

After nine hours of work Jack had finally finished what he’d set out to do. The only problem was that he didn’t feel like he’d accomplished a single thing.