‘They’ve seen us,’ said Florita, crying with joy. ‘Thank you, Jesus.’
Gallen was getting short of breath in the snow, his bruised ribs aching, and was thankful when the helo dipped its nose at the two survivors and accelerated across the forbidding terrain. The speed with which the helo crossed that impossible ground brought tears to his eyes.
‘They’ve located us,’ he said into the mouthpiece. ‘We’ll be down there in a couple minutes.’
Winter sounded excited. ‘Copy that, boss.’
Resting while Florita continued on through the snow, Gallen waved again at the helo as it closed on them. He looked for markings, but couldn’t see any. He wondered if an oil rig helo had joined the search for the downed Challenger.
Florita jumped at the top of a snow bowl and slid on her back to the bottom, her laughter rising above the din of the closing helicopter, which banked over her and hovered.
Something clicked in Gallen’s brain before he saw the man. Something reptilian, something that made him shrug the Heckler from his shoulder into his gloved hands. Then the man in the left side of the helo’s rear compartment pushed back the small hatch in the main plexiglass door and Gallen’s instincts were confirmed: it was the stance of that figure in the chopper, and the stillness of his eyes as he focused on Florita in the snow.
It was the appearance of a rifle and the movement of a man about to take a shot…
CHAPTER 22
Gallen cupped his hands and yelled, ‘Florita! Get out of there!’ His voice was barely audible over the vibration of the helo.
The shooter at the rear door of the helo pushed a muzzle through the gap of the smaller window and Gallen lifted his Heckler, flicked the safety. The rifle coming out of the helo looked like an M14, what the US military called a DMR, or a designated marksman’s rifle. It was accurate at two miles.
Finding a good shoulder and bringing the G36 to his eye-line, Gallen squeezed at the target and watched the shooter fall back from the door as a star appeared in the plexiglass.
‘Florita! Get down!’ he shouted, panting cold air out of his lungs.
The woman turned, confused, her face hidden by the wolverine fur around the hood.
The helo swept quickly away from the bottom of the bowl and Gallen started running, trying to reach Florita. Looking up, he saw the Little Bird standing off, the shooter now pushing back the entire rear compartment door and assuming a professional’s kneeling stance.
Surging to his left, clumsy in the deep snow, Gallen crawled and swam through the white hindrance to the cover of a large rock as the bullets whistled and sang around him.
Gasping for breath as he climbed behind the rock and checked the Heckler for load, he keyed the radio. ‘Kenny and Mike, this is lookout, do you copy, over?’
‘Gotcha, boss,’ came Winter’s voice. ‘This is home base. Those gunshots?’
‘Affirmative, we’re under fire! Repeat, under fire! Don’t come up here. Find cover and break out the rifles.’
‘Can do. Anyone hit?’
‘Negative. They have a sniper in the rear of the bird. Out.’
Shouldering the German rifle, Gallen rose over the rock and scoped the ground along the barrel of the G36, an old habit from special forces: in a gunfight, never let your head and eyes work independent of your weapon. The half-second that you lose is the half-second in which you die.
The helo hovered over Florita’s position; judging by the lack of gunfire, they couldn’t find her. Good girl, thought Gallen: she must be burrowing into the deep snow drift.
The helo swung about so Gallen could see a second shooter aiming from the right side of the Little Bird. Gallen ducked as chunks of rock and ice exploded five feet in front of him.
Kneeling behind the rock, Gallen scooped snow and patted it to the size of a bowling ball, his lungs struggling for air in the intense cold. He tore off his Thinsulate balaclava inside the arctic parka and stretched the material over the snowball as three shots sounded above the helo’s thromp.
Waiting, trying to make himself breathe slowly through his panic, he counted down from five and threw the balaclava-covered snowball as far to his left as he could.
The shots came fast, sending shards of black Thinsulate flying into the snow.
Breaking cover from the opposite side of the rock, Gallen got a bead on the shooter and put three bursts into the side of the helo. The shooter leaned back in surprise, but not before Gallen drilled him in the left kneecap, the stomach and the upper chest, just below his chin.
The shooter fell from the helo into the snow on the ridge. Banking away, the aircraft headed back towards the bottom of the bowl, and this time Gallen tried to run through the deep snow, knowing that Florita had no chance if the other shooter got even a glimpse of her.
As he reached the edge of the bowl, readying to throw himself down the toboggan track created by Florita, he watched the muzzle flashes from the side of the helo and saw the snow and ice coughing up chunks.
He now had a shot of almost one hundred yards to the helo. Lifting the G36, he conserved his loads by switching to single shot and trying to scare the pilot — few pilots enjoyed stars appearing in front of them and would generally stand off until the shooting stopped. But before he could put a bullet in the cockpit windshield, the sniper’s fire stopped and the helo banked away, keeping a wide arc as Gallen aimed-up.
‘They’re coming,’ he said into his mouthpiece, ripping his eyes off the helo disappearing over the ridge.
Heaving for breath, he looked back at where the snow and ice had been churned up over Florita’s body, knowing she couldn’t have survived. His job now was to help the living defend themselves.
Forcing his weakened legs to cover the thirty yards to the edge of the lookout precipice, he saw the red flare still burning in the air, its last glimmer of brightness about to expire as the shooting started out of view.
Scores of volleys sounded over the harsh noise of the helo as Gallen finally made it to the precipice. Exhausted, fighting for oxygen, he looked down along his rifle and saw muzzle flashes pouring out of the helo at the camp, and muzzle flames firing back. Winter was visible from Gallen’s position, shooting from behind the starboard engine that lay fifteen yards from the tarpaulin entrance to the fuselage. Ford was behind a rock, close to Donny McCann’s cairn.
Checking his magazine, Gallen found he had two-thirds of the loads left and he aimed-up, hesitating as he did so, watching the helo back off out of the range of the small-arms fire.
The sniper had pulled inside the cabin and Gallen let his rifle drop, knowing it was a waste of ammo at that distance. As the helo throbbed in the still air, he heard a whirring, squealing sound. Lifting the field-glasses to his eyes, he found the source of the sound: mounted beneath the cockpit of the helo was a black minigun; the squealing sound was the six barrels spinning in preparation to fire.
Gallen keyed the mic. ‘Kenny, this is Gerry. They’ve got a minigun. Get down.’
‘Copy that,’ said the Canadian, and then the most ungodly sound on a battlefield tore the air apart in a banshee’s shriek of lead. Fire spewed forty feet from under the helo as the electrically powered mini Gatling gun opened up at a cycle rate of twenty rounds per second, chewing a hole in everything in its path.
The first five-second burst reduced the Challenger’s starboard engine to shreds of metal but Gallen couldn’t see Ford’s body or any blood. As the helo swung to take out Winter’s position, the pilot’s profile was too tempting for Gallen: adopting a kneeling marksman’s pose, he started squeezing head shots at the pilot. The second caught the frame beneath the pilot but the man didn’t notice and opened up with the minigun. As fire flowed from the minigun, Gallen’s fourth shot starred the glass beside the pilot’s head, surprising him and making him bank away, the line of continuous fire creeping up the cliff face and sending cascades of rock fragments into the air.