“I’m with you, dude. Try east.”
“Into the sun.” He brought the stick gently right, watching his compass heading change on the HUD as the sun, still low in the sky, shone with a brilliant, golden light above a lowlying ripple of clouds on the horizon.
He thought of Sunny, and the last time they’d been together.
Peoples Republic of Georgia First Lieutenant Marty Cole, U.S. Army, opened the pilot’s-side door and clambered awkwardly into the cockpit of the VH-60 Black Hawk. He was stiff and sore from two days of hard flying mixed with nights of sleeping on hard cots in dilapidated shanties. Cold and hard as they were, folding cots brought in off the Guadalcanal and set up in a drafty tent were infinitely better than the parasite-infested bedding that was the norm in most of the buildings he’d seen since being assigned to the UN Crisis Assessment Team. But this morning Cole was starting to wish he’d taken his chances with the insect life.
“How’s it looking, Ski?” he asked, suppressing a yawn. Another thing he was wishing for was a decent cup of coffee, even a bad cup of coffee, to help him wake up. The stuff they served locally was worse than Turkish coffee… and a good explanation for why most people around here seemed to drink tea. Normally he was up before dawn, but he’d been out later than expected last night and not made it back to Tara until nearly zero-three-hundred.
Tara ― the name of the mansion in Gone With the Wind ― was what the American forces in Georgia were calling their camp ashore, a tent city just outside a ramshackle native village of stinking huts made of sod, clapboard, and sheet tin damned near as ritzy-looking as some of Rio de Janeiro’s poorer slums. Poti, the nearest city hereabouts, was almost as bad, shot to hell and almost abandoned.
Second Lieutenant Paul Dombrowski looked up from the copilot’s position and frowned over the top of the dog-eared preflight checklist. “You look bright-eyed and chipper this morning. Where have you been?”
“Crashed. Crashed and burned.”
“Big date last night, huh?”
“Don’t I just wish. God, I hate this place!”
“Well, we’re preflighted and ready to go. We’re gonna be late, though.
We’re running two hours behind our flight plan, at least.”
“The damned blue-hats don’t give a shit if they’re on time or not,” Cole said bitterly, ignoring for the moment the fact that both of them had been issued flight helmets painted the brilliant baby blue of the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. “Don’t see that it makes any difference to us how late we are.”
In his five years in Army aviation, Cole had served on his fair share of shit details, but this one, he figured, ought to satisfy his quota for at least the next seventy years or so. This whole operation was one big cluster fuck from start to finish, a monster conceived in good intentions, born in politics, and nurtured in the hellish clash of committees, boards, and panels that dominated every policy-level Pentagon decision made these days. The cross-service problems alone were staggering; Sustain Hope had started as a joint Navy-Marine operation, but the Army, unwilling to let itself be cut out of the potential treasure trove of political largesse, name recognition, and program funding that the UN mission represented, had wormed its way in through the back door. While CH-53 Sea Stallions had been ferrying Marines ashore yesterday, Cole and Dombrowski and their aircraft’s crew chief, Warrant Officer Palmer, had flown one of two Army UH-60 Black Hawks into Poti’s airfield.
They’d come to Georgia loaded for bear. Their Black Hawk had been equipped with ESSS ― an acronym meaning External Stores Support System. A deliberate copy of the external weapons mounts employed by Russian Hind helicopter gunships, the ESSS would let the Black Hawk ride shotgun for the UN Crisis Assessment Team’s Hip. There’d been a lot of sniping at UN air traffic over western Georgia lately, chiefly from Russian mobile antiaircraft units under the control of one or another of the militia or Russian army forces in the area; one UN helo had been shot down the week before, and two others damaged. The Army Black Hawk’s ESSS, loaded with sixteen Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, would be one hell of an incentive for those units to stay under cover and leave UN aircraft alone.
Dombrowski touched the side of his helmet, listening closely. “Uh-oh.
Here it goes.”
“What?”
“Two-seven finally checked in over the radio.” The code group referred to the Assessment Team, and their helicopter. “They’re saddling up.”
Cole glanced at his watch. “Only about two hours late. That must be a new speed record for a Crisis Team.”
The tall Pole’s frown turned into a grin. “All we have to do now is pray that nobody goes and insults the local honcho’s sister before we get out of here. They’ve got our flight plan so screwed up now I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll get back home before our enlistments expire.”
The Crisis Assessment Team had been on the move for over a week now, since long before the Americans had arrived. They were traveling from town to town throughout western Georgia, trying to determine from interviews with the locals ― and by whether or not anybody took a shot at them as they passed ― whether this wretched country had indeed been abandoned by the more organized Russian units, or whether Reds or Blues were still here in force. From what Cole had seen over the past couple of days, there wasn’t anything organized about Georgia… except possibly for the misery of its inhabitants. The towns were war-shattered, with little left but rubble and vast, sprawling, disease-ridden refugee camps and tent cities. The team they were escorting was a varied lot ― two U.S. Army officers who’d arrived with Dombrowski and Cole, two Marine officers out of MEU-25, three British army officers, a French air force man, two Turks, and an Ethiopian UN Special Envoy with the tongue-twisting name Mengistu Tzadua ― not to mention the ragged, heavily armed Georgian freedom fighter who’d insisted on accompanying the team as it made the rounds of the countryside, plus two people from the American Cable News network, a reporter and a cameraman. The whole operation was a bizarre melting pot. They could barely share ideas among themselves, much less quiz the locals on how the UN could better deliver humanitarian aid. Cole didn’t know how much more of this assignment he’d be able to put up with before he did something most undiplomatic. He was all for helping the victims of war by delivering humanitarian aid, but so far he’d seen more bureaucrats than relief workers, and it seemed like there was no end in sight.
Cole grimaced. You usually knew why you were on an op, and who your enemies were, and what the risks were likely to be, whether it was delivering food to Somalia or stopping the neo-Soviets in the snow-covered mountains of Norway. This was something totally different, however, a tangled web of crossed interests, cross purposes, and particularly unpleasant men with guns who weren’t always pleased to see the U.S. troops or UN peacekeepers.
“Here they come,” WO Chris Palmer called from the rear compartment.
“Finally!” Cole muttered, powering up the Black Hawk and gently feeding the twin T700-GE-700 turboshafts, listening to the rising whine of the rotors with a practiced ear. “Radio silent routine, people, once we’re airborne.”
Their orders had specified staying off the radios once in the air. The idea was to surprise Russian forces who might otherwise track them by their radio calls.
Moments later, another helicopter flew past, an odd-looking, ungainly beast with an elongated, rounded fuselage and prominent round windows along the sides. The Mi-8 Hip was an old Soviet design and was seen everywhere in this part of the world, especially for transport duty. This one had the blue UN flag painted on its side. “Hang on, everyone,” Cole said, and he engaged the collective, lifting the Black Hawk clear of the dirt.