“What the hell are you doing up there, girl?” Dallas yelled at her as the other Huey shot up in her perspective, the pilot caught off guard by their sudden maneuver.
Kat watched her altimeter unwind, and at a thousand feet, she began pushing the nose down to pick up forward momentum as she brought in the collective and leveled out, kicking the Huey around to the right in another tight turn.
As expected, the other pilot had followed her down, dropping rapidly, and was now flattening out his descent as he dropped below Kat.
Now you’re vulnerable! she thought, aiming straight toward him and shoving the stick forward to race at and just over the top of the other UH-1.
I’ve almost got this thing under control! Kat told herself, with a flash of relief, as she shot fifty feet over the top of the confused adversary and kicked her machine around to the left, staying behind and above him as he turned to find her.
The airspeed was dropping again, changing the requirements from basic stick-and-rudder flying to the skills of a helicopter pilot as she fought to stabilize her control inputs. But suddenly it wasn’t working. Her hand jerked the stick around, her rhythms and ability to commune with the machine suddenly compromised. The Huey was beginning to wobble off on its own, the airspeed now down to less than twenty as she tried to hover, gyrating left and right and even up and down as she fought to dampen her inputs and regain control. Sweat was breaking out on Kat’s forehead as the other pilot seized the moment to maneuver back into firing position.
Dammit! Fly! she snarled to herself, bringing the rudder pedals into the destabilized ballet as well, which worsened the gyrations.
The other Huey was turning on Kat’s right, bringing its open left-hand door into view. As she struggled with the bouncing, turning machine, she could see the two shooters raising their guns for another try as they came along her right flank. The advantage she had gained had been lost just as fast. She’d reverted to being a sitting duck, too low to use the sudden-drop maneuver, and too underpowered and out of control in a hover to suddenly pop up. The other helicopter was close now, the pilot controlling his speed of passage to give the gunmen plenty of time.
Robert MacCabe had been holding on just behind the center console. He spoke up suddenly. “Kat, they’re going to strafe us!”
“I know.”
“We’d better turn—or something.”
She nodded, her right hand finally reacquiring something close to a usable rhythm on the stick. The Huey settled down and moved forward, correcting to the right to aim directly at the oncoming machine.
“Kat! Ah … I don’t think ramming him is the solution,” Robert said as she accelerated directly at the windscreen of the onrushing Huey. She could see the pilot’s head moving as he altered his course to her right, unprepared for her maneuver.
Kat pulled up suddenly, trading the small amount of forward speed for altitude as the attacker slid below her.
More slugs tore through the Huey, most of them along the left side.
“Now!” Kat barked out loud as she kicked the rudder and banked excessively to the left, feeling the HU-1 almost stall as she tried to slip behind him.
Oh, no! Too much! They were heeling left at a violent angle, the side window suddenly filled with the top of the other machine.
“Kat! LOOK OUT!” Robert yelled. The tail boom of the other helicopter rose toward them at a frightening speed as they slipped to the left at too great an angle to recover.
“NO!”
The shuddering impact of the left skid with the whirling tail rotor of the other helicopter produced a momentary buzz-saw sound of colliding metal and threw them all to the right in a violent roll. Their destabilized chopper staggered sideways in the air before recovering, its basic airworthiness remarkably undamaged—but its left landing skid was a twisted mess, after an amazing shower of sparks.
“Good Lord, Kat!” Robert exclaimed.
“Wasn’t planned.” She banked to the right and skidded around the turn, expecting the other pilot to be lining up for another shot.
Instead, the sky to the right was clear.
Kat kept turning, scanning ahead, thoroughly startled when Robert grabbed her shoulder and pointed below.
“There!”
“Hang on!” the pilot had shouted to Arlin Schoen and the other man in the door as he pressed hard on the vibrating rudder pedals and tried to stop the world from whirling. He’d dropped the collective and tried to descend as soon as he realized that the other pilot, however inexperienced, had succeeded in damaging his tail. There was no doubt the tail rotor was in deep trouble, because the ship was vibrating at a furious rate. But the blades must still be there, so maybe he still had some control.
With a sudden lurch, the vibrating stopped as the damaged tail rotor flew off its hub, leaving him with no turning control. Instantly the spinning of the helicopter around the main axis of its rotor became worse. The pilot used all the tricks in the book: forward airspeed, unloading, sudden throttle pullback, but nothing worked. He was losing it, and the jungle floor was rising fast in a spinning, spiraling blur.
The crippled Huey slammed into the first of the trees, the tail boom swinging into a tree trunk and flipping the body of the helicopter over with a horrendous sound as the fuselage dove the remaining fifty feet to the ground.
The plume of flames and dust following the impact below heralded a crash too severe to be survivable, Kat figured. She kept her Huey moving at greater than forty knots as she circled at a distance and watched the funeral pyre of smoke rising from the wreckage.
“Incredible flying, Kat!” Dallas Nielson said, clutching the back of Kat’s seat.
“That … was actually a lucky mistake,” Kat replied. “I thought we were dead.”
“You got them, Kat,” Robert added quietly, his eyes on the smoke below.
“The question is,” Kat replied, “who were they?”
She tore her eyes away from the smoke and concentrated on climbing back to a higher altitude. Da Nang couldn’t be more than ten miles away to the east, and a plan, however improbable, was beginning to form in her mind—provided she could figure out how to land the old Huey without killing them all.
In the middle of a thicket of ferns, bushes, and brush some forty feet from the burning remains of the borrowed UH-1, something moved. A massive tangle of branches had cushioned the fall of a body thrown from the door of the crashing helicopter as the tail boom struck the tree trunk.
The figure stirred again, and tried to rise.
Arlin Schoen rubbed his eyes and looked around, the receding sounds of the helicopter he had intended to destroy in his ears as he spit out part of a branch, took inventory of his limbs, and calculated his remaining options.
chapter 27
DA NANG AIRPORT, VIETNAM
NOVEMBER 13—DAY TWO
6:31 P.M. LOCAL/1 131 ZULU
The Da Nang Airport ramp was less than five miles ahead.
Kat squinted to see through the steady hurricane of wind blowing through the hole in the windscreen. She slowed the Huey as much as she could and motioned Robert and Dallas close to the back of her seat.
“Robert, do you have any idea … who those assassins were?”
He nodded. “On the ground at the crash site, I recognized one of them from Hong Kong. One of the goons who tried to snatch me.”
“So, as I figured, they were trying to keep you from talking,” Kat said, working hard to keep her control movements conservative and the Huey flying smoothly.
“But as I told you, I really don’t know anything yet to talk about,” Robert said. “That’s the ridiculous part. They’ve validated the fact that Walter Carnegie really had stumbled onto something, but I still don’t know what.”
“Robert, we don’t have much time, and I’ve got to try to land this thing, but”—she looked back over her shoulder at him—“they left their business jet up ahead.”
Dan had been standing beside Dallas and behind Kat. He reached
out and grabbed Kat’s shoulder. “This is the copilot, Dan Wade. Who are you?” he asked.
“Special Agent Kat Bronsky of the FBI, Captain Wade. I’m sorry, there was no time to—”
“Don’t apologize! You rescued us. There’s no better introduction. But you mentioned a business jet?”
“Yes.”
“What kind? Not a Bombardier Global Express, by any chance?”
Kat turned partially in the seat to try to see Dan Wade’s face, but he was standing directly behind her and the momentary diversion caused her to bobble the controls. She turned her attention back to stabilizing the Huey and slowing.
“Dan, it is a Global Express. I think it may be the same one that shot, or sabotaged, your plane.”
There was a long pause before Dan spoke. “It was a Global Express that took off ahead of us, all right. He had to be part of it. There may have been a fighter out there too, because someone fired a missile that exploded in front of us.”
“The Air Force thinks it may have been a special phosphorous warhead, designed to flash-blind you,” Kat said.
“Yeah. That would be about right. It was hideously bright. I thought at first it was a nuclear blast in the distance, but since we immediately hit a shock wave, it had to be an exploding missile.”
Da Nang was on the nose now, two miles away. Kat felt her frustration rising that the small necessity of figuring out how to land was blocking some key questions. She looked hard at the ramp up ahead, relieved to see the Global Express was still parked in the same place. Kat turned slightly in Dan’s direction. “We’ll talk later. In the meantime, I plan to steal their Global Express, search it, and fly the evidence home.”
“You can do that?” Dallas asked, her eyebrows up. “You can fly a jet, too?”
“Well, I’m not trained in a Global Express, but I can fly it safely … with help.” She worked to find the right combination of power and pitch to slow the Huey a bit more and continue to lose altitude, aiming for the same spot they had occupied a few hours before, a hundred feet from the Global Express.
“Okay, everyone, this could get rough. Everyone please strap in!”
“You need me up here, Kat?” Robert asked, pointing to the copilot’s seat.
She turned quickly and nodded. “Yes. Moral support, at least. Wait! First, look out that left side and tell me whether I’ve got enough of the landing skid remaining to support this machine’s weight.”
She pulled back slightly on the stick, forgetting to lessen the pitch angle of the rotor blades—and the lift they were generating—with the collective lever. With less of the lift going to forward motion and more directed upward, the Huey began to climb sharply.
Gotta remember, down on the collective when I’m slowing like this. She made the adjustment and started descending again. The airspeed was less than thirty knots, and this time she was forcing herself to feed in some rudder to keep the Huey from turning as she slowed.
Robert was back, climbing over the center panel to get in the left seat. “Kat, the forward strut is gone, but the back strut is still there, and I think it’ll hold. The skid itself is partly there, attached to the rear strut.”
“If it doesn’t hold,” Kat said, “she’ll fall to the left on touchdown and the blades will hit the ground.”
They were less than a hundred feet from the target spot on the ramp, still moving forward at ten knots. Kat milked the stick back slowly and lessened the collective to compensate for the changing flight dynamics. She felt herself working the rudder pedals too much, and the nose swung back and forth, left and right, as she coaxed the Huey into what could pass for a hover and let it continue to descend. Her inputs on the stick were much calmer now, but still causing the helicopter to dance around.
She could see the Global Express just ahead, and she could see something else, which chilled her: The forward door was open and the stairs had been extended.
The momentary loss of concentration was too much. Suddenly she was behind the machine again, nudging the stick left when it should have gone right, and shoving it right when it needed only a nudge left, until they were rocking violently back and forth in all three axes as she struggled for control.
“DAMPEN YOUR INPUTS!” Dan Wade yelled forward, feeling the gyrations. “Easy does it! THINK the controls. Don’t move them!”
Kat felt herself tensing. Her hands shook, defying her attempts to relax. Any correction on the collective lever, and they were either dropping dangerously or rising precipitously. For every axis she brought under control, another would slip away into a left pirouette, a forward or backward motion, or just another severe case of the wobbles.
She was breathing hard, holding on, calculating the distance to the ground at twenty feet as she held the stick fairly still and forced herself to merely think the collective down a hair.
Obediently, the Huey began moving down ever so slightly, but going sideways to the right. Think it left! she commanded herself, amazed when the sideward movement ceased. Ten feet! Okay, just hold this, hold this.…
They settled to within three feet of the ramp, all forward motion now stopped. The Huey slowly turned to the left as she successfully tried the new technique again and felt the skids touch with surprising gentleness, the one on the left giving a little, then rocking them forward.
She felt her heart jump into her throat as the body of the helicopter suddenly shifted forward and to the left. The arc of the blades descended toward the tarmac as she instinctively hauled back on the cyclic stick, raising the blades even as the motion continued, then suddenly stopped. The blades were still whirling without obstruction, with the lowest point of the arc mere inches above the concrete.
Kat slowly let the rest of the collective down, reducing the lift to zero. She reached out, then, and cut off the fuel, shutting down the turbine engine rotor as the blades slowed and stopped.
“You okay?” Robert asked, watching her breathe hard, her hands still welded to the controls, and her head caged straight ahead. He saw her eyes flick over to him, then a smile began to play around her mouth. There was a nod, followed by a tremendous sigh of relief.
When the rotor blades had stopped, Dallas, Graham, Dan, Steve, and Pete Phu began helping one another up to move across the tilted floor toward the left door. A loud crack reverberated through the helicopter, throwing them farther to the left as part of the mangled skid gave way, leaving the Huey with the left forward part of the fuselage resting on the ground.
A military jeep was approaching fast. Kat found the release on the pilot’s door and climbed out, jumping to the ground in time to summon Pete Phu, the translator.
“Pete, this is very important. Whoever these guys are, explain to them what happened, that we were attacked, and the major … the pilot … was killed. Explain that the attackers got into a midair collision with us and damaged this helicopter. Do NOT, please, tell them that the attackers are from that Global Express over there, okay?”
He nodded. “No problem.”
“If he wants us to go in somewhere and—I don’t know, fill out reports or something bureaucratic, tell him we’ll do so in an hour. Not now.”
“You want to stand here on the ramp for an hour?”
“No. Tell them that’s our airplane, the Global Express over there. We need to check out something onboard first.”
A strange expression clouded Pete’s face, but he nodded anyway and turned toward the occupant of the jeep, a Vietnamese Army captain. A certain amount of arm-waving and examination of the damaged Huey ensued, the captain looking at every bullet hole and the shattered window before speaking into his walkie-talkie.
“What’s he saying?” Kat prompted.
“A lot of reports are needed,” Pete said. “Government property has been damaged and the pilot is dead. But he wants to know who these people are.” He motioned to the survivors.
“Tell him …” Kat hesitated, thinking fast. “They are survivors of the airline crash, and all are American citizen
s under my protection. Ask him if he needs to talk with the ambassador in Hanoi about this.”
Pete grinned. “I don’t think he will.” He turned to relay her words, watching the eyebrows of the officer suddenly rise when offered the option of checking.
“No, no, no! You will all wait here. My colonel says everyone must wait here,” he told Pete in Vietnamese.
“May they go over to check on their jet?” Pete asked the officer. “Remember, these are guests of our government in Hanoi. I don’t think your colonel is going to want to get in trouble with Hanoi.”
The captain thought for a second as he looked at the Global Express, then nodded. “Okay. But wait at the airplane.”
As the exchange continued, Kat moved to Robert’s side and motioned Dallas over, speaking quietly. “I’m going to go over to the Global Express and try to secure it. I don’t know why it’s open, and I don’t know if they left anyone behind. Stay here, and if you see the landing lights blinking on and off, bring everyone and come get aboard. I’ve held off the local officials for a few minutes, but if we don’t get in motion rapidly, we’re going to get stuck here.”
“Why?” Dallas asked.
“Somebody let those cutthroats park their jet undisturbed this morning and let them take a very expensive helicopter, and I’ll bet you anything it was all without customs or immigration or diplomatic clearance. That means a lot of money changed hands, and the recipient’s going to be very nervous right about now over all that’s happened with the crash, and now this damaged chopper. He’s very likely to do unpredictable and dangerous things, using his official position.”
“Understood,” Robert said, and Dallas nodded in agreement.
“Please bring my bag when you come,” Kat added. “I’m going to … get something out of it now and leave the bag with you.”
She moved into the Huey and retrieved a 9mm pistol from the dead pilot. She opened her shoulder bag and rummaged quickly for the plastic flex cuffs she always carried, verifying she could pull them out quickly.
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