“Broom leader to Broom Two and Broom Seven, sortie again on present heading and reform in five minutes, over.”
“Ah, wilco, Broom leader, warn the slicks so they don’t sweep me up on my way back” was one response. “Slick” was a generic military term for a helicopter. Corbett saw a sun glint as one of the dots ahead and to his left began to rise out of formation, picking up speed. He locked the pixel program onto that dot, saw it become a bulbous, ungainly swept-wing brute as it accelerated. Evidently the other sortie craft was so far down the line that Corbett could not spot it. But he recognized the aircraft with icy dread. Oh, my God: they’ve got a squadron of Harriers!
Mop and broom; it’s a major sweep, Army “slick” choppers and those goddamn Harriers! And they’re sending a pair of Harriers ahead to see if they can flush me, he realized, slowing, dropping nearer to the hard-baked soil. He knew by now that Broom was the Harrier code word, and stayed on Broom’s frequency as he kept one eye on the blue-and-gray camouflage of what was obviously a Marine Harrier. It passed a mile to his left at four hundred knots and gave no indication of spotting him, but Corbett knew that he was more nearly invisible when motionless on the ground than while his gleaming canopy bubble skated above the surface. He planted his legs hard, employing the waste gates in an attempt to land almost instantly in one of the many broad depressions of the scrub-dotted landscape.
The line of sweepers, AV-8B Harriers interspersed with Army helicopters flying behind and even lower, was clearly visible now, a vast armada of machines all capable of hovering, and of outrunning him. Someone had worked out an unlikely but fearsome combination, the sinister Harriers flying so slowly that their thrust diverters flung mighty downdrafts of jet exhaust toward the ground. That line trailed a virtual dust storm behind it, the product of their downdrafts. Corbett did not remember until too late that, painted skin or not, the hellbug’s diverted air sent a huge spurt of dust flying as it touched down. And the dust storm raised by the searchers was probably no accident; even a pixel-covered skin might stand out as a distinct outline in such a soup of flying particles.
Corbett had hardly felt the grazing thump of hardpan when one of the Harrier pilots in a line approaching at perhaps a hundred miles an hour and so near that Corbett could see their flaps extended broke in with, “Broom leader, your ten o’clock on the deck! Canopy in a circle of dust!”
Corbett firewalled his throttle; the impeller was still revving respectably and as he cleared the ground, the sweep line was almost directly overhead, slowing in response to the sighting. But an aircraft of the Harrier’s fourteen-ton mass does not maneuver well at such low speeds, and though they were spaced over four hundred yards apart, they used precious seconds in their attempts to maneuver in midair without colliding. Meanwhile, Corbett skimmed tumbleweeds as he plunged Black Stealth One’s nose into that dust cloud.
Eighty knots would not have been enough for most light craft to crab sideways, dead-level, in a pall of dust without losing a wingtip. Corbett managed it using partial waste-gate power, virtually skidding, the right wing swinging fast until he was moving almost parallel to the dust pall. But one of the Hueys must have seen his canopy too, and Corbett knew it only when he saw the earth before him erupt as if a land mine had detonated.
If Corbett had been in doubt about the Hueys’ armament, he knew now. Though some military helicopters carried rockets and cannon, this one had loosed a burst from its chin turret, a minigun firing as many rounds as six machine guns. Corbett veered right, now moving at a hundred knots, passing under the Huey before it could swing to keep him in its sights. He saw the bulk of a Harrier swing sluggishly into place ahead of him, sinking, and no more than fifty feet above.
The tremendous downblast of the Harrier’s superheated jet exhaust, so close above, would have slammed the delicate hellbug into the ground had Corbett flown into it. Instead, he judged that the Harrier was slowing and killed most of his own forward speed by a sharp, almost vertical climb, then nosing over. He ended directly above the Harrier, slamming the waste gates open, and found himself riding a few yards above the brute, its rudder an upswept scimitar scant feet from the hellbug’s wing root.
The Broom channel was simply chaos. Two of the monsters had apparently collided, one of them damaged enough to force an emergency landing. A Huey circled, clearly unwilling to risk hurling a wall of lead so near a “friendly,” but Corbett could see the shining ellipses of other Huey rotor blades as the choppers converged. He wasted no time trying to reprogram the hellbug’s skin, knowing the bird plumage would be useless and too many warriors were converging from too many points to let him fool more than one.
Corbett could see the pilot below him as the man twisted in search of the hellbug, revealing his head-up display screen. The HUD might reduce a Harrier pilot’s workload, but it was little use against a fugitive hanging overhead. The Harrier pilot did not take time to consider his choice, so he did what attack pilots like to do: he began to accelerate.
Corbett grinned fiercely, though he knew he could not keep forward pace with the Harrier for more than a few seconds. Had its pilot simply landed then and there, Corbett would have been an easy target for those Huey slicks the instant he moved away at fifty miles per hour. The pilot had a definite agenda, however, with darted glances at the rearview mirror on the upper left side of his canopy. Corbett saw him try to use his rudder like a cleaver through the hellbug’s wing and rocked that wing upward, as if to bank in one direction. Then, failing to match the Harrier’s pace above a hundred knots, Corbett jinked upward and banked the other way.
The main rotor of the following Huey almost cut his wingtip off. It could not have missed the hellbug by more than an arm’s span and its tail rotor did not quite miss, ripping a chunk the size of a man’s hand from the wing trailing edge; and the hellbug’s trailing edge was tough stuff, developed from the same filament-loaded aramid polymers used in bulletproof vests. The Huey’s small tail rotor, its tips shredded unevenly, set up a hellish vibration as it began to come apart.
Corbett saw the Huey go down, spinning madly around its main rotor axis, and took the time to “check his six,” using the scanner to show him who might be closing on him from his six o’clock position, directly behind. There were three of them, a Harrier and two Hueys, and Corbett heard the Marine pilot warn the Hueys aside as he readied his rocket pods. Good, I’m more worried about them than about you, Corbett thought, and saw the two smaller blips on his rearview screen move well aside. That was when he yawed the hellbug to place himself directly between his pursuer and the Harrier he had used as a shield before. It was completing an ungainly turn ahead of him.
His pursuer loosed one salvo anyway, the pencil-slim rockets glinting harmlessly past the hellbug’s wingtip like huge needles, and Corbett was nearing top speed as he flew directly toward that turning Harrier which now approached head-on. Both of the Harrier pilots announced, one of them with short Anglo-Saxon comments, their plight: they would be firing toward each other. And while their rockets were no thicker than a man’s wrist, one of those little warheads could equal one Marine airchine. Broom leader evidently forgot which channel he was on as he demanded side passes by the Hueys.