The weapons operator selected the Harbin’s fixed cannons, opened fire, and twelve-point-seven-millimeter rounds spat from the nose-mounted muzzles — the line of the shell’s flight described by bright orange streaks of the tracer rounds. The pilot slowed to avoid overflying the enemy aircraft and adjusted his line of attack, trying to keep pace with his prey’s erratic maneuvers.
Kilkenny imagined the smell of cordite as the tracers flew past, his mind recalling from memory the distinct scent of combat. He pitched the BAT’s nose down while simultaneously executing a half roll to the right. The BAT’s pilot-friendly flight characteristics compensated for Kilkenny’s rudimentary skill at the stick, resulting in a passable split-S maneuver. As the BAT dropped into the fog, the roll changed direction 180 degrees. Kilkenny saw the shadow of the Harbin race past overhead, slowing as it reached the spot where he disappeared into the fog.
He reached over to the seat beside him and unlatched the five-point restraint. With his right hand firmly holding the tarp in place, Kilkenny pulled back on the stick and put the BAT into a loop.
‘Hah! And Mom thought all those hours playing Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat were wasted time.’
‘Did you hit it?’ Liu shouted.
‘I don’t think so, sir,’ the weapons operator replied.
‘He may be trying to double back on us,’ the pilot said. ‘Everyone keep your eyes open.’
The pilot slowed the Harbin and began a cautious turn to the right. Seated behind the pilot on the right side of the aircraft, Peng searched the fathomless haze for any sign of the enemy lurking beneath. He hadn’t noticed, but his helmet cropped off the outer edges of his peripheral vision, serving not quite as blinders but reducing his field of view by ten percent. Whether that missing percentage would have made the difference, Peng didn’t know, but when he finally saw the BAT, it was shooting straight up out of the fog like a missile.
‘He’s behind us!’ Peng shouted.
The pilot pulled the stick hard to the right, bringing his guns around, but the BAT was now above them. Inverted over the Harbin, Kilkenny pulled the tarp out of the seat and dumped it out behind his wings. The Harbin’s main rotors sucked in and devoured the lightweight bundle of fabric. The tarp flapped furiously against the blades like a flag in a gale, creating a camouflage green halo.
‘Something’s on the rotor!’ Peng shouted.
‘I feel it,’ the pilot cried out. ‘It’s affecting the controls.’ The pilot’s hard right turn continued past the point where the BAT emerged from the fog and raced toward a full revolution. The weapons operator spied the black form overhead and squeezed the trigger on the forward guns. At close range, the Harbin raked the fragile BAT with a punishing fusillade. Heavy rounds pierced the articulating wings and tore the nacelle from its mounts. The BAT shuddered under the barrage. Kilkenny felt the hair on the back of his neck rise as shells whizzed past, some just inches behind him as he dived through the line of fire. Once hit, the nacelle above Kilkenny’s head consumed itself and disgorged a cloud of ceramic fragments. Like the men of BAT-2, Kilkenny felt a stinging rain of shards piercing his skin. He fought to control the BAT as it plunged back into the mist.
Above the Harbin, the main rotor shredded Kilkenny’s only weapon, transforming the large tarp into hundreds of ragged strips.
‘It’s breaking up,’ Peng noted.
‘Wa cao!’ the pilot cursed. ‘It’s going to destroy the engines.’
The Harbin’s twin turboshaft engines inhaled the free-flying debris, and layers of camouflage fabric choked the flow of air into the compressors. Destabilized by an unbalanced airflow, the compressor began to disintegrate. As the pilot raced to secure the engines from damage, the cabin filled with a popping sound like that from a rapid-fire gun. The two compressors were self-destructing.
‘Brace for impact!’ the pilot shouted. ‘I’m going to try a power-off landing.’
The pilot declutched the rotor from the now-failed engines, allowing the blades to autorotate. He fully lowered the collective to maintain rotor RPM and pressed down hard on the right pedal to keep the fuselage from spinning beneath the rotor. The Harbin’s nose pitched forward with the loss of power, and it slipped into the fog. The pilot pulled back on the cyclic stick to correct his angle of descent and keep air moving steadily through the main rotor. Above the cabin, the main rotor continued to spin like a maple seed corkscrewing through the air to slow the aircraft’s fall to earth. The pilot was performing the helicopter equivalent of gliding.
‘I’ll keep us up as long as I can, but we need to land fast,’ the pilot warned. ‘Find someplace flat!’
The BAT fell like a wounded goose, wings fluttering impotently as it tumbled from the sky. The RITEG had shut down, and the controls were dead. Kilkenny wondered if he soon would be as well. His body tensing, he tried to stay loose — the blow that was coming would be hard.
The BAT struck the lake inverted, its widespread wings slapping the water flat like a brake, jarring Kilkenny in his seat. Almost immediately, the BAT began to sink. With his legs braced against the frame to hold himself in place, Kilkenny popped the quick-release button on his five-point restraint. He grabbed the frame where the tubular segments joined at the top, rolled his legs forward out of the seat, and dropped into the lake.
Although most of his body was warm inside the form-fitting SEALskin suit, the icy salt water found every tiny slit cut by shards from the nacelle. In each wound, the saline solution increased the number of ions available to race through Kilkenny’s nervous system, telegraphing signals of pain to his brain. Almost as quickly, the cold numbed the areas around his exposed injuries, resulting in a neurological détente as his brain sorted through the input, deciding which sensation to recognize.
Kilkenny treaded water as he tried to regain his bearings and assess his situation. The heads-up display in his helmet flickered as lake water saturated its electronics — unlike his SEALskin suit, the helmet was not designed for immersion. But before the display shorted out, Kilkenny determined the direction of the nearest shore. He removed the helmet, which had filled with water up to his mouth, and let it sink to the bottom of the lake. He checked for his pistol and combat knife, then swam for shore at breakneck speed.
The surface of Bangong Co was as smooth as glass and deep blue even under the blanket of fog. The constant movement of his arms and legs kept a fresh supply of warm blood flowing in his extremities. The lake’s high level of salinity aided his swim by making him more buoyant, but Kilkenny’s suit was the key to his survival in the water. Without it, he would have succumbed to hypothermia long before he reached shore.
I wonder what Gates will say, Kilkenny thought, if I mention Icarus when I tell this story?
The Harbin limped along in flight, the pilot struggling to maintain altitude. The four men aboard gazed doggedly through the windscreen as if by force of will they could part the veil of mist and find a safe place to land. The fog thinned as they approached the shoreline, the combination of sun and wind flowing down from the mountains stirring the haze. By midday, it would be gone.
‘I see something,’ the weapons operator said.
Ahead loomed a mountain, and the pilot turned to parallel the shore. The slope fell almost vertically into the water, where the dropoff was steep and close to shore — a hundred feet deep just a stone’s throw from the water’s edge.
The pilot followed the contour of the lake, noting how the water bent around the mountain, flowing along the path of least resistance. On the far side of the mountain, the curve in the shoreline tapered into one of the long straight segments of the lake.