“I wouldn’t,” Reyes said, “if I were you.”
“I can’t see much,” Gurt admitted.
The clouds had closed in as they neared the top of the pass. Snow and sleet raked across the windshield of the Bell. The 212 was slowly ascending, but barely making any forward movement at all. They were flying blind on the edge of the helicopter’s performance envelope.
“I’ve got a road,” Murphy suddenly shouted, “on the port side.”
Gurt spotted the black stripe against the white background. A movement of vehicles across the terrain had displaced most of the snow, leaving only dirt and rock.
“What’s that?” Gurt said, straining to see.
“I think it’s a column of tanks,” Murphy said.
“I’ll go to one side,” Gurt said, “and stay in the cloud cover.”
Along the side of the road, a Chinese tank commander was watching several of his soldiers repair a tread that had come loose. He heard the helicopter in the distance, so he climbed inside and called his superior on the radio.
“No idea,” his superior reported, “but you’d better find out what it is.”
Popping his head out of the hatch, the tank commander shouted down to his men, then he began to pass rifles out of the hatch. Two minutes later, the soldiers were hiking up the road away from their disabled tank.
“THERE’S the crest,” Murphy shouted. “Find a spot to touch down.”
Gurt played with the collective, but at this altitude he had little control. “Hold on,” he shouted.
The landing was more a controlled crash than a touchdown. The 212 came down hard on the skids, but they held. Murphy was already unsnapping his safety harness.
“Driver,” he said, smiling, “just keep her running—I’ll only be a minute.”
Opening the door, he stepped out and a few feet back and opened the cargo door. Then he removed a pair of snowshoes, which he attached to his feet. Pulling another coat over the one he was already wearing, he began to dig in a crate, placing the items he needed into a backpack.
“Hold down the fort,” he shouted to the front of the helicopter. “I’m going to set the charges.”
Gurt nodded, then watched as Murphy disappeared into the blowing snow. Then he began to play with his radio. He found little to hear, so he switched back to the regular frequency.
“SHERPA, Sherpa, Sherpa, this is the Oregon, over.” In the control room, Eric Stone looked at Hanley with worry.
“That’s the fifth time, nothing.”
“Sherpa, Sherpa, Sherpa, this is the Oregon, over.”
“Oregon, this is Sherpa,” Gurt answered. “Read you eight by eight.”
There was a two-second delay as the signal bounced off the ionosphere and down to the ship.
“Where are you?” Hanley said, taking the microphone.
“We’re on site,” Gurt reported. “Your man just left for the appointment.”
“We just intercepted a communication from the bad guys,” Hanley said. “Someone heard you go over and they’ve been asked to investigate.”
“This is not good, Oregon,” Gurt said quickly. “I have no way to reach Murphy and warn him. Plus, it’s going to take us some time to lift off.”
“Okay,” Hanley said, “we can send a signal to Murph’s beeper—we’ll tell him to return to where you are. In the meantime, keep a close eye for anyone approaching. If they do, you take to the air.”
“Send a message to Murphy to withdraw,” Hanley said to Stone, who quickly punched the commands into his keyboard.
“My visibility is around thirty to forty feet,” Gurt said, “and I’m not leaving Murph—no way.”
“No, we don’t want you to—” Hanley started to say.
“Oregon,” Gurt shouted over the radio. “There are Chinese troops coming through the snow.”
Murphy was bent over, placing the charges in the snow, when his beeper chirped. He finished attaching the detonation cord, then rose up and removed the beeper from his pocket.
“Damn,” he said, flipping the switch open so the charge could be remotely detonated. Then he pulled his M-16 around from his back on its sling and began heading back in the direction of the helicopter.
Gurt reached behind his seat and felt for a handgun in a rack. The Chinese troops were struggling through the thick snow, making slow but steady progress toward the Bell. They were holding rifles, but they had yet to take a shot.
Murphy stumbled along as fast as one could run on snowshoes. While he ran, he was folding out a grenade launcher. Reaching over his shoulder into the pack, he removed a rocket-propelled grenade and started fitting it into the launcher. He was on a sloping ridge, racing down, when he first caught sight of the Chinese troops. They were twenty-five feet from the Bell. Murphy estimated his angle and fired a grenade. It went over the heads of the Chinese troops and exploded. They flopped on their bellies in the deep snow.
“What the—” Gurt started to say as he turned and saw Murphy approaching in the distance.
Adding fuel to the turbine, Gurt tried to lift off. Nothing. Murphy was twenty feet away now and racing toward the helicopter. The first few Chinese troops began to rise from the snow and shoulder their rifles. Gurt started firing the handgun from the window. A couple seconds later, Murphy’s M-16 opened up.
Ten feet now. Gurt reached across and opened the copilot’s door. Murphy paused in his firing, removed his pack, placed it gingerly behind his seat and climbed inside, holding the M-16 in his lap. Gurt was firing the handgun and fiddling with the collective at the same time.
“Morning,” Murphy said when there was a moment of quiet. “Anything exciting happen while I was away?”
“We have no lift,” Gurt said before squeezing off a few rounds. “I’ll need to milk the cyclic to get us off the ground.”
The Chinese troops had stopped advancing. Now they were digging in to make their kill shot.
Murphy slipped between the seats into the rear and yanked open both cargo doors. “Quit firing and take us up, Gurt. I’ll handle these boys.”
Milking the cyclic is bad for helicopters. It consists of jamming the cyclic from side to side while pumping up and down on the collective. It can create lift when there is none—but it can also easily cause the mast that supports the rotor to bump against other parts of the helicopter. Then you run the risk of a nick or a fracture in the mast.
Lose the mast and you’ve lost the helicopter.
The firefight had erupted so quickly that the Chinese tank commander had little time to rally his men. Now that he’d had a few minutes to prepare and his troops were dug in to the snow, he began to shout orders that would concentrate the fire in the right direction.
Gurt slammed the cyclic from one side to the other and the 212 began to rise slowly.
Right at that instant, the Chinese commander screamed for his men to advance, and the front line rose. At the same time, Murphy triggered the grenade and it left the launcher with a whoosh and a burning smell that filled the cabin. The round landed six feet in front of the lead soldier and exploded. Murphy followed that up with a complete clip from the M-16. He replaced the clip and prepared to fire again.
Just then, Gurt got the Bell off the ground and struggled to turn away from the firefight.
They were a hundred feet away from the Chinese troops when Murphy blew through the second clip and the bloody snow where the Chinese troops lay began to fade in the distance. He quickly replaced the clip, set the M-16 to one side and reached for the remote detonator.
The C-6 erupted with a force equivalent to ten thousand pounds of TNT. A slab of snow was ripped from the side of the hill and raced down the slope, covering the Chinese troops. Then the slide raced across the road with a wall of snow and ice twenty feet high. In sympathy, smaller slides broke loose from the opposite hillside from the shock wave that trembled through the rock and soil. These slides added another eight to ten feet to the mess already created. The few Chinese troops still living after the firefight were buried beneath the wall of snow.