She couldn’t hear the Navy radio traffic, but she could listen in on the A-10s following on to the attack in Raqqa firing Hellfire missiles, and it sounded like the mission was going to plan.
All the U.S. aircraft were using Hellfires only, which caused a relatively small amount of damage as compared to JDAMs or big iron bombs, and other ordnance that the F-18s and A-10s could carry. But the target location was in downtown Raqqa, and collateral damage had to be kept to a minimum, so this necessitated several runs from each aircraft to pick the buildings apart, as opposed to a single pass from a couple of Hornets to flatten the area with two-thousand-pound bombs.
The enemy was firing a huge number of ZU-23 antiaircraft cannons, their tracers arced into the sky, but so far the Navy and Army fixed-wing attack had suffered no casualties.
Even the report from an A-10 pilot that a Stinger missile had locked on to his aircraft turned into a non-event, as the weapon apparently lost the lock because of hills or buildings.
Forty-five minutes after the attack began, all the aircraft had egressed the area. The Pyro and Freight Train flights were ordered to reposition to the south while the Black Hawks of the 160th came in to pull their special mission units out of the area, so they set course for another spot of desert, where they would fly another pattern.
Carrie Ann watched while a pair of high-tech Black Hawk helos raced far beneath her, just over the rolling sand, on their way south to pick up their Delta Force or SEAL Team operators.
Seconds after Carrie Ann lost sight of the Black Hawks, the combat controller came over her headset, telling her he was patching her through to the JTAC frequency on the ground in Ratla. This surprised her, as the Joint Terminal Attack Controller was embedded with the special operations troops, and he was in charge of directing aircraft and artillery fire on targets. He might have been used during the attack phase of tonight’s mission, although Ratla was far enough away from the target location to where she doubted it. But she couldn’t imagine why he wanted to speak with Pyro flight, especially since his extraction helos were on the way.
Seconds later a crackling voice came over her headset. “Pyro One-One, this is Lethal. How copy?”
“Pyro One-One. Solid copy. Send traffic, Lethal.”
“I am a JTAC embedded with SF.” He read off his grid coordinates to her and she typed them into her computer. “I have no more air assets in the area, but multiple targets just appeared, my sector. A convoy of eight vehicles, confirmed squirters from target location.” He read off the grid and she tapped this in, saw on her moving map display that the vehicles were on Highway 4 and heading east, between the towns of Ratla and just south of the Euphrates River. JTAC asked, “Are you available to prosecute these targets at this time? Over.”
Troy could hear the conversation, and he confirmed they had thirty-five minutes of flying time.
Freight Train was armed only with door gunners, so Pyro 1–2 would have to return with the Chinook to Turkey. This left Carrie Ann and Troy alone to fly south, into ISIS territory, to attack the convoy.
She did not hesitate. “Affirmative, Lethal. We are one Apache with eight Hellfires, seventy-two rockets, and nine hundred dual-use cannon rounds. We are on the way. ETA eleven minutes.”
“Roger that. I’ll talk you right to them. We are waving off our extraction until you smoke these guys.”
Carrie Ann’s heart began pounding against the steel plate on her chest. Troy came over the intercom, all business, giving her his plan for hitting the highway from the east, so that they could rake the length of the convoy and maximize their effectiveness.
Thirteen minutes later they banked hard to the east at an altitude of only one thousand feet, and Carrie Ann selected a Hellfire missile. When the convoy rolled out of a village, still heading east just south of the Euphrates, she said, “Firing Hellfire,” and launched at the lead technical. The plan was to destroy the first vehicle and then send wave after wave of Hydra rockets into the convoy.
The Hellfire struck the technical, blowing it apart and whiting out the FLIR screen for an instant, then pilot Troy Oakley went to maximum speed. Through the targeting system over Davenport’s right eye, Oakley could see red crosshairs over his own aiming device that told him exactly where his front-seater was aiming. Through this he could line up the rockets directly on her intended target.
“Firing,” she said again, her voice clipped and intense. A dozen Hydras launched in quick succession, and raced across the highway below toward their target two kilometers to the west.
Before the first even struck, Carrie Ann called, “Cannon!” and switched now to her cannon. This she could aim herself just by moving her head, and she fired burst after burst at the convoy.
On her FLIR she could see multiple explosions down the length of the convoy from the rockets, and then the cannon fire tore through them, eviscerating the soft-skinned vehicles. She could see individuals running off the highway into fields along the Euphrates, but they would have to turn for another pass before taking out any of the ISIS operatives on foot.
Oakley began lining up for a pass from the west, when warning sensors shrieked in the cockpit, announcing a radar lock on Pyro 1–1.
Oakley shouted, “SAM!” as soon as he knew a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile was coming their way.
The automatic countermeasures on the Apache began launching flares as Oakley put the aircraft into a steep dive for speed and a corkscrew to outfox the approaching missile. Carrie Ann grabbed on to handles and watched a cultivated field fill up her windscreen and grow larger by the second. She closed her eyes, certain they would auger into the dirt, but Oakley pulled out of the dive and leveled out, sending Carrie Ann pressing deeply into her seat and her stomach retching.
The SAM passed by, but now they were only fifty feet off the ground and racing over the highway, just a couple hundred yards from anyone who survived the onslaught of Hellfire, cannon, and rocket fire. Carrie Ann saw tracer fire from heavy machine guns right over her, dancing by her cockpit from left to right, and then she heard a rapid punching sound below her feet.
Through the intercom she heard Oakley call out to her in a hoarse voice. “Carrie! Your ship!”
In the front seat Carrie Ann was surprised by Troy’s call, but she took her eyes out of her weapons screens and looked instead out the front glass. Simultaneously she grabbed the cyclic with her right hand and the collective with her left.
“My ship!” she said. She was about to ask just why Oakley was handing piloting duties over to her when he spoke again. His voice was weaker this time.
“I’m hit.”
“Where are you hit?”
“Took a… took a shot through the canopy. Might have ricocheted, but it’s got me in the neck. I’m bleeding pretty good.”
“Jesus,” she said. “We’re heading back.”
“Negative,” Oakley said. “Press the attack!”
Captain Davenport ignored her backseater and raced north away from the highway, low over the Euphrates, as more tracer fire whipped around her from multiple directions.
“Press the attack,” he said again.
“When we get back we can watch the gun cams together. We took out every one of those eight vehicles, and seventy-five percent of the personnel. That’s a good night’s work.”
Oakley did not respond.
“Oak? Hang in there, Oak, you good?”
“Roger that,” he said, but she could tell he was about to pass out.