“This one’s low and slow,” Doberman told him, already stepping the Hog down into a more leisurely glide. He could see some tracks leading off the highway but couldn’t tell if they belonged to the wrecked vehicles or someone else. If it was someone else they were gone. The tank and APCs the Hogs had splashed sat like twisted wrecks, forlorn and waiting to be claimed by the junkman. Nothing moved.
He wasn’t letting Apache One take a chance, though, not with Rosen aboard and Dixon depending on them. He slipped back around and stepped down to Hog country— five hundred feet, speed dropping now to just under three hundred knots, tiptoeing over the enemy’s dead bodies.
The downed helicopter sat in front of a shallow plateau, looking as if she’d just set down. Doberman put the A-10 on her wing, waltzing through yet another pass, this one as close to a walk as he could manage, though he was still moving so fast he couldn’t be sure there wasn’t someone hiding in the wreckage.
But no one had fired at him, and the helo was now under two minutes away.
“See anything, Dog?” asked A-Bomb.
“Looks clean,” he told him. “You?”
“Negative,” said A-Bomb.
Doberman saw a small bee zipping in from the southwest. It was Apache One.
“Greenlight,” he told the commandos. “Kick ass.”
“Kick it yourself,” was the reply.
CHAPTER 67
Rosen jumped out of the arriving helicopter right behind Captain Hawkins, her tool case in one hand and an MP-5 in the other.
She’d have trade both for a manual. She was a damn expert in avionics and com gear, a whiz at everything electronic, and had worked on gas turbines enough to smell like them— but her mind went blank as she ran toward the helicopter.
Just fuzzed. She knew it would come back, but until then, how to jump start it? She glanced quickly at the top of damaged helicopter and its tail, saw that they were intact, then lugged her tools into the cockpit.
“Hey!” she yelled behind her. “Where’s my pilot?”
“Here,” said the man, a tall, chain-smoking Floridian whose name was either Slim, Bim or Flim; she couldn’t be sure.
“Start it up,” she told him.
“You don’t want to check it first?”
“Maybe nothing’s wrong. Start it up. If it works we’ll worry about it later.”
“What about the rotor blades?”
Rosen gave the pilot a look that made him climb inside. She took the co-pilot’s seat and examined the interior; nothing was obviously out of place, except for the bullet holes in the windshield— and the dead pilot’s blood.
“I’m trying to turn her over but I got nothing,” said the pilot. “Instruments are dead. Engine should be coughing and the rotors cranking, see? You gonna check it now?”
“Good, we’re looking good,” Rosen said. “Kill the power. Don’t smoke until I’m sure there’s no gas leak,” she said, zipping open her toolkit and then clambering out the door to climb between the rotor and the roof. Her mind was still fuzzy, like a TV caught between pictures on two different stations.
Then it cleared, and she could imagine a motor laid out perfectly in her head.
Trouble was, it didn’t belong to an AH-6G, or any other member of the MD530 family. In fact, it didn’t belong to a helicopter at all.
It was a good ol’ Chevy 350, V-8, stock, untuned, lying the center of the vast engine compartment belonging to her grandfather’s Impala.
Heck of a motor, just not what she wanted to be thinking about right now.
The stream of bullets that had taken out the pilot had made an arc up the top of the glass across the roof and rotor mechanism. The bullets seemed to have either missed or grazed off. There were dents in the faring but nothing serious.
“Don’t smoke!” she warned the pilot as she slid off the front of the helicopter.
“It ain’t lit!”
She climbed over the rocket launcher and hung beneath the body of the aircraft. A spray of bullets had nearly shot one of the bottom right-side access panels off. The metal was so loose that a touch of her screwdriver kicked it away.
And damned if the problem, one of them anyway, wasn’t right in front of her— the bullets had chewed up one of the wire harnesses.
Hey, ignition system, no shit. That was exactly what had been wrong with Grandpa’s Impala. Except it had been damaged by squirrels, not 30 mm bullets.
There was a warren of wires here, enough to keep a squadron of mechanics busy for hours testing and tying them together.
Best punt, as Sergeant Clyston would say.
“OK, Slim Jim, hey, come here,” she shouted. “And for christsakes, don’t fucking smoke!”
The pilot slipped out of the chopper. Rosen was used to Air Force pilots, most of whom ran instead of walked. The Army Special Ops pilot had a much slower approach to life, ambling around to her.
Or maybe she had just been thrown into overdrive and the rest of the world was at normal speed.
“You see colors?” she asked.
“What do you mean colors?”
“You color blind?”
“No.”
“Good. This is gonna be kind of like a game, except it’s not.”
Rosen took a roll of spare wire and electrical tape from her toolbox and threw it to him. Then she explained how to strip the ends off the wires and reattach them. She emphasized the importance of getting the color coding absolutely correct; they could easily short something important out if they didn’t.
“We going to re-attach everyone?”
“Only if we have to,” said Rosen. “Every five wires, you go see what works. Just shout before you do.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Number one, I want to make sure the gas tanks aren’t leaking before you blow us all to bits.”
“It ain’t lit!” he protested, taking the cigarette from his mouth to prove it.
Hawkins saw that the survivors from the firefight, or maybe reinforcements, had taken away the dead, including the Americans. Relief mixed with his anger as he surveyed the scene. Taking the bodies back would have been difficult if they couldn’t get the second bird going. The captain called his two men back and made sure they had carefully gone through the site. He knew, of course, that they had, but asking was part of his job and they accepted it without complaint, assuring him the site was “clean.”
“Wait for me by our helo,” he told them, then headed over to Rosen. She was working on something at the tail end of the aircraft.
“How long?” he asked.
“If this rotor control and the wires are the only problem, I’m thinking another ten minutes, fifteen tops. This isn’t serious at all.”
“What if they’re not the only problem?”
“Well, I think they are. The blades are all good, the engine itself wasn’t hit and there’s gas. The infra-red radar will probably be out and I won’t vouch for anything electrical until the engine’s back, but Slim Jim ought to be able to fly it back.”