Instead, he increased the speed a notch, whipping around the twist in the canyon, coming up just a little to give himself some more maneuvering room if the ground rose sharply around the bend…
… and there was the contact!
He had only a glimpse, and from a difficult angle. The Tomcat was coming up on the helicopter from behind, about in the seven o’clock position, but he had time enough to see the heavy weapon pods mounted to port and starboard, the long, low, smooth curve of the fuselage. It was painted in a green-and-brown camo pattern that blended well with the valley floor.
“I see him!” Dixie called. “Target is a Hind gunship!”
Then he pulled the stick back, rammed the throttles all the way forward into Zone Five afterburners, and kicked his Tomcat into open blue sky.
CHAPTER 8
“Jesus H. Christ!” Cole shouted, jerking the control stick over and banking sharply as a silver shape thundered past the helicopter a few hundred feet overhead, then broke into a sharp climb. “What the hell was that?”
Dombrowski shook his head. “Oh, shit, man! Who told those Navy bastards they had the right-of-way?”
“Navy?” It took Cole a moment for that to register. “Oh, yeah, sure, the flyboys watching the no-fly zone. Man, that guy scared the shit out of me!”
“Guess he got bored flying CAP and decided to come hassle us,” Dombrowski said.
Cole swore and brought the helicopter back on course. “Man, the moment we get back, I’m reporting this one! That guy could’ve smashed us into a cliff with his jet wash!”
But something was nagging at him. According to the op plan he’d seen, the Navy fighters were supposed to fly racecourse tracks out over the sea unless there was a specific reason for them to fly inland. A reason like a no-fly zone violation.
“Dom,” He said, feeling cold. “Get on the horn. Raise Tara. Find out what the hell a Navy F14 is doing in here.”
“Radio silence, LT. Remember?”
“I don’t give a shit about radio silence! I want to know what the hell is going on!”
“Bird Dog Two, this is One,” Batman called. “Say again your last!”
“One, this is Two,” Dixie’s voice said, harsh with urgency and with the stress of a high-G climb. “Target Sierra One is a Hind gunship. I say again, Hind gunship.”
Batman pulled back on his stick, taking the Tomcat to eighteen thousand feet. His VDI showed three targets now, Mason and Garrity’s F14, the UN helo, and the bandit.
“Cat,” he radioed. “Do you concur?”
“Sorry, Batman. I didn’t see it. We’ve got a Zoo down here in the rocks and I was working my board.”
“Bird Dog One, this is Dixie. I only had a glimpse but it was pretty close. I made the weapons pylons.”
“Do you have it in sight now?”
“Negative,” Dixie replied. “Still in my climb. He’s behind us somewhere.”
At the top of his climb, Batman eased the stick left and put the nose over, lining up the shot. On his HUD, the targeting pipper drifted toward the bandit, moving up the mountain valley. At a range of just over five miles, he still couldn’t actually see the target, but the Tomcat’s computer had painted it on his VDI and again on his heads-up display, a tiny circle of green light. Pipper and circle connected.
“Batman,” Malibu said over the ICS. “I’ve got something from UN Two-seven. It’s garbled… something about they’re under attack.”
“That Hind must be taking shots at them. Tell ‘em the cavalry’s on the way,” Batman said. “I’ve got the bandit lined up. Target lock!”
He decided to go with a heatseeker rather than a radar-guided AMRAAM. With the target between his AWG9 radar and the valley floor, there was too great a chance that the missile would accidentally lock onto the ground instead of the Hind. The helicopter’s engine exhaust was hot, the ground cold. It would make a perfect target beacon for the AIM9.
He snapped a selector switch and immediately heard the high-pitched warble as one of his Sidewinder missiles “saw” the heat emitted by the helicopter.
His thumb closed on the firing switch. “Fox two!” he called, giving the alert that told all friendly aircraft that a heatseeker was in the air.
With a piercing shoosh, a Sidewinder slid free of its rail beneath his starboard wing, streaking toward the valley five miles away. As its exhaust flare dwindled, Batman suddenly remembered the date and broke into a grin behind his oxygen mask.
“Trick or treat, you sons of bitches,” he said.
“You raise Tara yet?” Cole demanded.
“Yea, but things are all screwed up. Sounds like a Chinese fire drill back-” Dombrowski stopped. He’d turned in his seat to illustrate his point and stopped in mid-sentence, staring out of the Black Hawk’s cockpit toward the rear.
“Dom?”
“Shit! Missile! Missile! Incoming!”
Cole acted on instinct alone, bringing the Black Hawk’s nose up and over in a hard turn to the right. No helicopter in the world could outrun a missile; their one chance was to turn into the missile and pray that it smacked into the ground before it could correct.
They almost made it.
The AIM9 Sidewinder streaked in at 660 miles per hour, arrowing down from above and behind the Black Hawk, homing on the bright, hot flares of exhaust spilling from the two engine exhaust shrouds beneath the big four-blade rotor. The missile’s tiny brain was correcting the weapon’s course, bringing the AIM9 up to match the target’s forward vector when it struck… not the engine, but the tip of one whirling rotor blade.
The explosion was shattering, but not as deadly as it might have been if the warhead had detonated inside the target’s engine, as it had been designed to do. Cole felt the aircraft lurch suddenly, and then the helicopter was violently oscillating, the entire ship jerking back and forth with each turn of the rotors. He battled the stick, trying to bring the ship back under control. The landscape was whirling past the cockpit now as the Black Hawk spun dizzyingly into the valley.
It felt as though they’d lost all or most of one rotor blade; the imbalance would tear the engine apart in seconds, but with luck and some decent piloting, Cole thought he might be able to save enough collective to make it to the ground all in one piece. Nursing the engine, battling stick and pitch and collective, he brought the spinning aircraft down. In the last second or two before touchdown, however, the machine started to go over onto its right side, and nothing Cole could do would right it. The spinning rotors chewed into earth and the Black Hawk’s fuselage counterrotated. An instant later, the engine blew, and a ruptured fuel line spilled aviation gas across a red-hot manifold.
They struck hard, plowing into soft earth, the impact softened somewhat by the right-side ESSS crumpling with the crash and breaking away. Cole gasped as he slammed against his safety harness, then again as his seat tore free of its mountings and slammed him forward into the instrument console. The fuselage bounced once, then rolled partly upright; the change in attitude let the pilot seat collapse backward into an approximation of its original position.
Stunned, his chest shrieking agony with each breath, Cole still managed to hit the release and drag himself free of the seat. Dombrowski’s head lolled to the side; Cole couldn’t tell if the copilot was dead or unconscious. Blinking back tears against the pain, he unstrapped Dombrowski, tried to drag him free… and failed. The man’s weight was too much for him to handle with what felt like several broken ribs.