Primed for Action

Chapter 9

Six miles and two minutes’ flying time from the D-boys’ drop point, Captain Emily Beale unleashed her gunners.

“Steel!”

Big Bad John and Crazy Tim laid into the hillside with their Miniguns.

The Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk motto was, “We Deal in Steel!” No one had ever placed a helo in the sky more lethal than SOAR’s DAP Hawks. Neither a Cobra nor an Apache could bring the same trifecta of weaponry, sensors, and a four-person crew.

Tonight they’d hit it lucky and spotted a couple of heat signatures walking along the ridge. No innocent shepherd would walk these hills at two in the morning. Nor start firing rifles as they broke into a run.

“Two down,” Tim reported. They hadn’t run far.

John chimed in. “Four ducked behind a ledge, three hundred yards at two o’clock low. Small-arms fire incoming.”

She twisted the Hawk, and Archie let fly with one of their high-explosive, 2.75-inch rockets. The explosion hit the cliffside above the position. A boulder avalanche tumbled down on the bad guys and swept them away into the valley.

Big John’s shout, “Yes!” confirmed the kill. Six on the move at night would have spelled serious pain for the local 10th Mountain company in the morning. It also probably meant more were on the move.

Emily had been keeping her eye out for the Little Birds but still barely spotted them, even with her night-vision gear. The static discharge of their rotor tips striking the airborne dust painted faint circles in bright green traces on her equipment’s eye. The Little Birds slithered in behind the ridge with the cave opening in it. Two D-boys per side sat on their fold-down benches.

At thirty meters up, the tiny helicopters checked their mad dash. She couldn’t see them at this distance, but the D-boys would wrap their feet and hands around the fast rope and slide down only feet apart. Five seconds to place everyone on the ground and drop the ropes. On cue, the Little Birds’ two-man crews turned to run for the FARP to refuel and wait.

Once the Little Birds were gone, she and Henderson slid in perfect unison over the ridge on their side of the valley. Let the cave dwellers think the fight had moved on. Archie, her copilot, killed a couple rocks with rounds from the 30 mm cannon to sound busy.

At two hours and twenty minutes, they ran the back side of the ridge. They took a few miscellaneous rounds shot by baddies stupid enough to underestimate a DAP Hawk. The sound of each passing bullet was instantly computer analyzed and revealed the shooter’s position on the tactical displays. Big John and Tim took turns pouring a couple hundred rounds from the Miniguns right back down their throats. Second volleys from the ground rarely happened.

At two hours and thirty minutes, she and Henderson roared back over the ridge with the hammer down. At a hundred and eighty knots, more than two hundred miles an hour, they crossed the valley in ninety seconds flat and probably weren’t audible until the last fifteen. By nursing her attitude to maximize the air inflow for the turbine engines at this altitude, she managed to arrive three full seconds ahead of Henderson.

Emily kept her smile to herself but felt pretty damn good about that.

She scanned back and forth. Archie would worry about the condition of the Hawk, she kept her focus on the collection of helos suddenly cluttering the sky.

They started taking heavy rifle fire from down in the valley, and Henderson peeled off to deal with it. Per plan, she stayed high and back to protect Clay’s birds and the three Little Birds who had returned from Bronson’s refueling point.

All went according to plan until they started loading. Twelve D-boys came out of the cave exactly on schedule, but now twenty-six people streamed from the cave mouth onto the narrow ledge that formed the only possible pickup point. Two D-boys and seven baddies, the practical limit at this altitude, piled into each of Clay’s transport Hawks as they hovered a foot from the ledge. They also loaded hefty cases and an armful of laptops.

The Little Birds dodged in and grabbed seven of the eight remaining D-boys while a cloud of fire rained down from above. Their jobs now were to be safe and far away. Two D-boys were hit but continued to return fire to lower targets from their bench-seat perches as the Little Birds scampered along with Clay’s flight.

One more Delta operator knelt in the cave mouth, busy at something. The walls were so steep that he was being shot at from directly above and the Hawk had no way to bring weapons to bear. She could climb up and take them head-on, but there was still the one D-boy marooned and no one left to fetch him before someone else found a good angle on him.

A loud “krump” and a massive updraft shook her bird. Henderson must have found the shooters directly below and dropped a couple Hellfire missiles in their laps to make that kind of shock wave. The gunfire from below evaporated.

She kept her eye on the D-boy as she slid forward into the narrow defile. He still knelt, safe from above, two steps inside the mouth of the cave. The spatter of small-arms fire sounded from behind her. Her gunners had switched to their new handheld FN SCAR machine guns and were leaning out the doors to shoot upslope as well as they could around the rotor’s edges. Not the best, but it was all she could give them.

The rain of bullets from above meant that the D-boy would never survive a trip to the pickup ledge. Time to find another solution.

“Kick a rope. Starboard.”

Archie spared her a glance as Big John kicked a thirty-meter-long fast rope out the door. Anchored on a short door boom, the two-inch-thick woven rope dangled for a hundred feet below the Hawk.

Nudging the helicopter forward, the sound of her rotors echoed off the walls—walls far too close on either side. The rope still hung twenty feet shy of where the D-boy crouched, now facing her from under the cave’s protective overhang. Small-arms fire from above hemmed him in on three sides, the cliff wall on the fourth. In moments, someone would find the right angle and he’d be done for.

She edged in until the tips of her rotor blades couldn’t be more than five feet from the cliff wall on either side, still too far.

“Spot the rear rotor for me.”

Big John swore over the headset.

Emily leaned into the right foot pedal as softly as she could. The defile was too narrow for the Black Hawk to fit sideways, but she could swing the rope closer to the cliff wall by twisting a bit.

“Fifteen, ten, five. Damn it, Captain. Trimming trees next.”

For an instant she stared down through the plexiglass window by her feet at the D-boy perched on the cliff edge ten feet from the rope and twenty feet below her. The rocks around him sparked with rifle fire from above.

It was Michael. She was close enough to recognize him with her night-vision goggles. He stared at her for a long moment before turning to finish whatever he was doing.

An RPG passed between them, somehow missing the spinning rotor blades as it passed close enough for either of them to reach out and touch it. A rocket-propelled grenade would be death for all of them. It blew when it hit the slope hundreds of feet below, but she didn’t flinch. Kept the rope steady ten feet off the cliff.

He finished and turned to face her. She knew he’d be assessing her as well as the tactical situation. It had been clear enough in the briefing that he didn’t trust her, but she’d been assigned anyway. That meant Henderson did trust her. Well, she wouldn’t let him down.

A spate of fire chased the D-boy back for a long three seconds, rattling like buckets of hail across her windshield. When it eased for a moment, he nodded his head once and leapt.

She held steady against her own downdraft swirling between the cliff walls. If he missed, he’d smack rock in three hundred feet and fall a thousand more before stopping.

“John?” Emily didn’t dare break her concentration long enough to look down.

“We’ve got him.”

She pushed her left pedal to get the tail rotor clear of the wall. Then backed up on the cyclic control and, raising the nose ever so slightly, slid backwards out of the defile. More rounds hammered against her windshield. Small arms mostly, but one big c***k appeared from a heavier weapon finally brought to bear. Hopefully the Hawk’s bulk shielded the D-boy, because she couldn’t do anything for him dangling below her.

Then Mark Henderson roared by, almost close enough to enmesh their main rotors. He pulled his bird near vertical, giving his gunners the best line on the ridge. A stream of Minigun fire burned into the baddies. In moments, the fusillade that had pounded her Hawk cut off, concentrating on the more hazardous target now close at hand. Mark gave them a quick round of rockets, and the distinct hammer of the 30 mm cannon could be heard echoing off the canyon walls.

Then his airspeed spent, he tumbled downward but recovered with a sharp twist away from the cliff.

Damn but the man was a joy to fly with. She could always count on Major Mark Henderson in the air. Always. And that wasn’t something you could say of most men, or many at all. Now if only he didn’t insist on chapping her ass every single second they were on the ground.

She kept easing back, watching the rotors to make sure she didn’t catch a tree and send them all plunging to their deaths. Once she was clear, a tongue of flame roared out of the defile right where they’d been hovering ten seconds earlier. The concussion knocked her helo farther back.

“Damn, did we lose him?”

“Nope, he’s on tight.” Big John called. “Looks like he’s pocketing something. Remote detonator maybe. Guessing he stayed behind to set the mines.”

Dangling by one hand a thousand feet in the air, the D-boy had triggered the mines he’d left behind to destroy the cave. She leaned into the controls, backpedaling for all she was worth, the DAP Hawk’s nose pointed to the sky to give the rotors maximum rearward power. She ran the turbine engines right past redline. They roared in response as she was rammed down hard enough in her seat to hit the stops on the shock absorber.

A second blast proved her guess right: Michael’s explosives triggered a massive ammo dump inside the mountain. The cliff face blew outward, spattering her bird with a pounding rattle of fist-sized rocks, and a whole section of the mountainside headed down for the valley.

They dragged the rope up with its human load and hauled ass back to base.