“Gretchen,” Kacey said over the intercom. “We’re coming up on the bunkers. There are going to be two out the port, the left, side. Orient your fire there.”
She’d made sure the gatling was on that side for a reason. She’d considered not taking it, and the ammunition which was even heavier, but suppressing some of the fire was going to be better than flying through cold.
“Make sure you hit them, girl,” Kacey added. She banked gently to the side, using the rotor to turn as much as anything. Just keeping the damned bird in the air was about all she could do and they weren’t going much faster than a horse. This was truly gonna suck.
“There,” Baakr Sadeghi said, looking out the slit of the bunker. “There is the helicopter we have been hearing.”
“Why is it going so slow?” Hanan ed-Din asked.
“I don’t know,” Baakr said, pulling back the charging bar on the 12.7mm machine gun. “But it’s not going to fly much further.”
Gretchen had gotten oxygen masks on the worst of the casualties, all the masks she had, and replaced the blood packs on two. The floor of the Hind was now awash in blood, deep enough that it was lapping up on her boots. The Russian and Varlam were sitting in it, which was worse.
Now, though, she had other things to think about.
She pressed the button that cycled the first round into the gatling gun and took it off safe. The 7.62 gun was electrically driven with eight barrels that would fire an amazing four thousand rounds per minute. She had never fired one, but it was supposed to be much like the machine-guns she had trained on. Just much more powerful.
She also had never fired from a moving helicopter, but Chief D’Allaird had told her “just lead them a little.” He’d chuckled when he said it for some reason.
She would have to do her best.
However, although she should be seeing the bunkers, she couldn’t pick them out. They were down there somewhere but camouflaged.
“Ma’am,” she said, nervously. “I don’t see… ”
Baakr led the helicopter, slightly, aiming for the area where the engine must be. When he was pretty sure he had a good sight he pressed the butterfly trigger of the machine gun.
The rounds missed to the rear, sparking off the tail. He continued to fire, twisting forward…
“Never mind!” Gretchen shouted as first one then the other bunker opened fire. She depressed the trigger of the minigun and was startled to see what looked like a stream of fire come out of it. The sound was like nothing she had ever heard in her life, like one of the chainsaws the Kildar had bought, but infinitely louder.
The worst part, though, was that she was missing. The rounds were striking forward of the bunkers and she twisted her body sideways, bringing them around…
“Prophet’s Ghost!” Baakr swore as the bullets, what seemed more like a laser, swept across the front of the bunker. All of them had been high, chewing the sandbags of the top rather than striking through the narrow firing window, but he ducked nonetheless.
“Maybe they were going slow so they could hit us better,” Hanan said from the floor of the bunker beside him.
“We took some dings,” Kacey said. “I felt the strikes.”
“Dings, hell!” Tammie shouted. “I’ve got a hole in my right window!”
“Gretchen, how’s things back there?”
Gretchen stopped firing as soon as she couldn’t twist the minigun any more to the rear.
“I’m fine,” Gretchen said, keying her throat mike and turning away from the window. “I think… ” She stopped and sobbed. “Oh, Father of All.”
The stray 12.7 round had travelled upwards at over eight hundred meters per second, cresting the top of the armored door on the side of the helicopter and striking Viktor Makanee from underneath, passing up through his lower abdomen and then bouncing off the armored top of the squad bay to ricochet, unnoticed, out the troop door next to Gretchen.
The effect upon hitting Viktor’s recumbent body had been something like a small grenade exploding in his midsection. The top of the troop bay was splashed with red that dripped on the other casualties and pieces, mostly intestines, of her brother’s body were scattered across the bay. Virtually his entire body from his lower rib-cage to his hips was missing.
The straps, across his legs and chest, had kept those parts in place. And Viktor still had that happy, goofy, grin on his face she knew so well. He’d been hit too fast, and hard, to even grimace.
“We took one casualty,” Gretchen said, trying not to let her voice break. “Otherwise we’re fine.” She reached up and plucked at something dangling in her view. It was green and dripping and otherwise she couldn’t begin to place it. She just knew it was from her brother’s body. She suddenly realized that her back was sodden with blood. She laid the dripping thing carefully on the stretcher. “We’re fine.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Haza Saghedi raised himself out of the stream, hands up.
He had managed to kill several of the Russians before he realized they were not, in fact, the enemy. He’d heard the different tone of the firing to the rear and swept around to the side, shooting at least one of the camouflage clad figures that was sweeping across the convoy of mujaheddin.
However, he was, perhaps, the only survivor. He had hidden under bushes as the pig infidels had swept the area. With long experience of surviving under every circumstance he wasn’t about to let these pigs get him. He had vengeance to enact.
The approaching group, though, was probably Chechens, mujaheddin as he was. They weren’t very good, their sweep technique was awful and they looked jumpy. But that just made it that much more important than he attract their attention from as far away as possible.
Despite the fact that he was in clothing acceptable to the prophet and had his hands up, the idiots fired at him. So he dropped back down and waited.
“Who is there!” a young voice called.
“I am Haza Saghedi Al-Rusht, Al-Kemar, Al-Abdullah, Sword of the Prophet, Lion of Kandahar and warlord of the Pasht and if you shoot at me again I will take that weapon from you and beat you as your mother apparently never did!”
“Haza Saghedi Khan,” Commander Bukara said, nodding in respect. “Your name is far known. Can you possibly explain this debacle?”
“We were hit by a pincer movement just as the meet started,” Haza said, wiping at his arm. One of the shots from either the Russians or the other group had hit him a glancing blow on his forearm. It would become only one of many scars. “I have no idea who they were. It was not the camouflage of the Spetznaz unless they use something very different here. It looked something like the new American, but still not that.”
“Keldara,” Bukara said, holding up the patch. “Georgians from over the mountains. They have a new warlord, an American. I was told a meeting was going on, but also told by some very senior people to stay out of the way.”
“Perhaps that was a mistake,” Saghedi admitted. “Several mistakes were made. I think the people I had on security were not looking the right way. But that is to be forgotten. Those Keldara pigs have captured a senior member of the Movement. They must be stopped.”