The Complete Night Stalkers 5E Stories

Chapter 1

1

“Mission recall. Repeat, mission recall.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.” Lieutenant Manfred “M&M” Malcolm looked down at the radio to make sure that it was on tonight’s frequency and that the message wasn’t for someone else.

“I’m only three goddamn klicks out!” He shouted at the radio, though he didn’t hit his transmit key to send his least fond regards. There were some places that American military helicopters should never be caught and he was in one of them. His Little Bird MH-6 was stealth rigged and his radio signal was encrypted…but that wouldn’t make him or the point of origin of any electronic transmission invisible.

“Mission X-ray Tango Alpha is aborted,” the Air Mission Commander repeated. “Return to base.”

XTA. Extraction of prime target Alpha. That was his mission tonight.

“Goddamn it!” He hated the alphabet agencies. DIA, NSA, and most particularly the CIA. They never seemed to know what they wanted. In the military, you received a mission, you planned it, and you by god executed it after you were given the “Go!” order. In the CIA he figured they had a mission board and flung darts at it until they hit something and said, “Oh, let’s do that.” He’d bet they wore blindfolds while planning or whatever it was they did back in Langley. After that, because s**t flowed downhill, it would be:

“Hey Manny,” as if pretending they were already on a first-name basis before they’d even talked and he didn’t have a rank after a decade of flying and even facing down Officer Candidate School. “We have a top level asset”—which meant spy—“whose cover is blown. We need an immediate extraction. Tonight.”

There were only two companies in the entire US military able to fly a route like the one needed, SOAR’s 5D and his own 5E. The helicopters of the Special Operations Aviation Regiment’s 5th Battalion E Company had been in a better position so he’d been sent in.

Now he was deep behind Russian lines—except the Russians still insisted they weren’t in Crimea—and he had to figure out how to get back without tripping some high-tech booby trap. All that noise about the Russians being so far behind in tech was just that, noise. Their problem was that they couldn’t afford as much of the good s**t as America could, but what they had was damned impressive. And those heavy-duty assets were concentrated in places of particular importance to the Russian government…like every square meter within a hundred klicks of his present position just outside of Sevastopol, Crimea. Which had been part of the Ukraine until recently. He wished it still was, because then he’d be welcome instead of being a target.

Low and fast had been his answer going in; he just hoped that it would work equally well on his passage out. He yanked up on the collective and shoved the cyclic forward to lay the hammer down hard.

That hope lasted almost thirteen seconds.

Some Russian soldier with an itchy trigger finger and thirty-year old technology fired a missile at his trace. It was a crazy waste of $100,000 Igla surface-to-air missile, because Manny knew that his craft’s radar signature wasn’t much bigger than a fat seagull’s. It was a stupid move by an undertrained molodoy; an action for which he’d probably be punished above and beyond standard new-recruit hazing. Any soldier with a decent amount of training would have ignored that faint blip on the tracking radar.

What the goddamn, suffering molodoy would never know was that he’d actually done his job exactly right.

Once on Manny’s tail, there was only so much that could be done to disguise the thousand degrees of heat exhaust from his turbine engine. The missile had flown close enough to sniff out that heat signature and zeroed in. It moved at almost Mach 2 and he moved at about one-tenth of that.

A locked-on Igla wasn’t something that was evaded by a quick maneuver. The “needle” as it was aptly named, was about to drill his ass. It ignored the signal-blocking chaff that Manny dispersed. Firing off a round of distracting flares would illuminate and pinpoint his location for much more substantial forces. He saw only one chance and punched for it. Head for the sea.

The high cliffs south of Sevastopol were just close enough for him to dive over the edge and buy himself a few seconds before the missile reacquired. A half kilometer out from shore, he stalled the helicopter hard, heaving back on the cyclic until the joystick was jammed into his gut. His Little Bird groaned and wept, but it slammed from a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour to under forty in moments.

He armed the self-destruct charges, unsnapped his belt, and dove out the doorway.

He was less than halfway to the water when the Igla caught up with his Little Bird. The explosion was blinding in its reflection off the water, the concussive punch of combined missile and destruct charges made the last twenty-five feet of his fall go by very quickly.