And she had to admit that Mason was a superb flier, one of the best she’d ever seen. Despite the enthusiasm, technically he was an iceman, cold and hard and precise. The emotions showed through when he was under stress, but all he really needed there was some seasoning.
“Bird Dog, this is Dog House.” That was Lieutenant Chadwick’s voice, from Ops. “Do you copy, over?”
“Bird Dog Leader copies, Dog House,” Batman replied over the open channel. “What’s the gouge?”
“Bird Dog, we confirm your bogey, but we still don’t have an India Delta yet. Repeat, no confirmed identification on the bogey. Nothing on radio and no IFF signal. Before we take further action, we need a positive visual ID. Until we do, we’re calling it a possible hostile. Over.”
“Ah, roger that, Dog House,” Batman replied. “With stress on the possible, right?”
“That’s affirmative, Watch Dog. You’ve got weapons free, but stick to the ROES. Get a positive visual identification before you do anything. The last thing we need is a friendly fire incident to lead the news stories today.”
“Understood,” Batman said. “We’re on it, Dog House. Bird Dog clear.”
He paused. “Dixie, you still with me?”
“Bird Dog Two, roger,” Mason answered.
“You hear all that? We’ve got weapons free, but mark your targets.”
“That’s a roger.” Cat heard him pause. “Uh, Skipper? You think this one’s for real?”
“Hell, that’s what we’re here to find out. You keep your eyes peeled up there, or I’ll have you in for another session of sensitivity training.”
“Oh, no, not that, Skipper,” Mason said, his tone mock-serious.
“Anything but that!”
Cat laughed. The politically correct crowd back in Washington had been leaning hard on the Navy to provide sensitivity training to teach tolerance, understanding, and acceptable behavior toward women and minorities both. It was thoroughly loathed by all concerned and didn’t seem to do very much good, though the people issuing the directives seemed less concerned with results than with the actual issuing of the directives.
It was a strange world, sometimes.
“Don’t worry, Dixie,” she said over the ICS. “Even if this run turns up dry, I’m sure we’ll see action pretty soon. Up at North Cape and the Kola, it was one damned crisis after another. I’m beginning to think the old Jeff just kind of draws trouble like a magnet.”
“Just my luck if everything goes quiet as soon as I get in the game,” Mason told her. She could hear just a trace of bitterness in his voice. “You train every day of your life for something that never comes… know what I mean?”
“Hey, don’t forget who you’re talking to back here. Of course I know what you mean. And believe me, if women can get a piece of the action out here, your turn’s bound to come up!”
0928 hours (Zulu +3)
UN Flight 27 UN
No-Fly Zone, Republic of Georgia
Cole had never particularly liked low-altitude flying in rough terrain, and today was no exception. But the Hip with its VIP passengers up ahead was flying NOE so that they could get a good look at the terrain below as they passed, and Cole knew better than to argue with the brass. Especially when most of the brass belonged to self-important UN twits who tended to retreat behind language problems anytime they didn’t want to understand a complaint or a protest.
“Keep your eyes on the road, L-T,” Dombrowski said. “That’s about the only way to tell we’re on course.”
“Yeah. Right.” The road, in this case, was a track that might have been paved once, but which had deteriorated under harsh weather, hard use, and lack of maintenance. According to the map, it followed this valley all the way up to Chaisi, up among those ice-capped peaks ahead.
He saw something up ahead, a squat vehicle parked alongside the road. He touched Dombrowski’s arm and pointed. “Shit, Ski, that looks like a Zoo down there.”
“Got news for you, man. It is a Zoo.” Dombrowski grinned at him. “One of our freedom fighter buddies told me about ‘em last night. His people have a few of them, compliments of the Reds when they pulled out. It knows we’re coming, and it won’t fire. Probably.”
Cole muttered a curse. “You might tell a guy, you know. The altitude we’re pulling now, we’d be dead meat before I could get us high enough to dodge those suckers.”
The “Zoo” ― slang for the ZSU-23-4 ― was a deadly air defense weapon that was one of the most dangerous pieces of equipment in the ex-Soviet arsenal. A self-propelled tracked vehicle mounting quad AZP-23 cannons, it fired 23mm shells directed by the B-76 radar code-named Gun Dish by the U.S. military. A Zoo could wreak havoc with any low-flying aircraft unlucky enough to stray into its line of fire.
Neither man spoke for a long moment. Then Cole looked across at Dombrowski, scowling. “And just what the hell do you mean by ‘probably,’ anyway?” he demanded.
Dombrowski laughed.
0929 hours (Zulu +4)
Tomcat 218 UN
No-Fly Zone, Republic of Georgia
The blip winked onto Dixie’s Vertical Display Indicator with the suddenness of a thrown switch… a hard signal from the Tomcat’s own AWG-9 radar, not a data link feed from the Hawkeye. “Contact!” he yelled. “I’ve got him now! Bearing oh-one-oh, range four miles.”
“I keep losing him in the ground clutter,” Cat added. “Getting an eyeball on this guy’s going to be tough.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it.” The typical helicopter cruised at less than 150 miles per hour, a snail’s crawl to a Tomcat howling in at just below Mach 1. And with the helo flying down on the deck in these rugged mountains, spotting would be that much harder.
Mason craned his neck, straining to get a visual on the bogey even though he knew they were still too far out. At four miles, an aircraft was a speck when it was back-lit by the sky; this clown would probably be wearing camouflage, and he’d be down on the deck. But at almost six hundred miles per hour, they would cover four miles in just twenty-four seconds. In that same period of time, the bogey would cover just about another mile; thirty seconds and he and Cat would be smack on top of them.
Mountains rose to left and right, gray granite walls, some cloaked with pine trees, others barren. He was following a river valley now, relatively flat and a couple of miles across but bounded by sheer cliffs and woods-cloaked slopes. Snow flashed at the highest elevations.
“Hey, Dixie?” Cat called from the backseat. “Maybe we should back off from the wall a bit.”
She wasn’t referring to the valley wall, he knew, but to their speed.
Flying slower would be safer… give them both a chance to see something.
But he was eager. He wanted to get there, now.
“Just another few seconds, Cat. We’re almost there.”
The radar contact vanished off the screen, less than two miles ahead.
Dixie could see why ― the valley took a sharp turn to the left up there, and the slopes to either side went vertical, turning the valley into a tight, rock-walled canyon. The bogey must have just gone around the bend.
“Keep your eyes sharp,” he told Cat. “The bastard’s just around-“
“Radar contact!” Cat cut in. “We’re being painted!”
“The helo?”
“Negative! Negative! I read it as Gun Dish!”
“Christ!” Dixie swore. “A Shilka!”
Shilka was the Russian name for the quad-mount ZSU-23-4. Dixie’s first instinct was to haul back on the stick and grab some sky, but he held the Tomcat’s altitude steady as he eased into the dogleg of the canyon. Shilkas were relatively short-ranged and couldn’t reach targets at altitudes of more than a mile or so, but Dixie knew that he would offer a perfect sighting picture if he suddenly popped his Tomcat up out of that valley.
Instead, he increased the speed a notch, whipping around the twist in the canyon, coming up just a little to give himself some more maneuvering room if the g
round rose sharply around the bend…
… and there was the contact!
He had only a glimpse, and from a difficult angle. The Tomcat was coming up on the helicopter from behind, about in the seven o’clock position, but he had time enough to see the heavy weapon pods mounted to port and starboard, the long, low, smooth curve of the fuselage. It was painted in a green-and-brown camo pattern that blended well with the valley floor.
“I see him!” Dixie called. “Target is a Hind gunship!”
Then he pulled the stick back, rammed the throttles all the way forward into Zone Five afterburners, and kicked his Tomcat into open blue sky.
CHAPTER 8
Saturday, 31 October
0930 hours (Zulu +4)
UN Flight 27 UN
No-Fly Zone, Republic of Georgia
“Jesus H. Christ!” Cole shouted, jerking the control stick over and banking sharply as a silver shape thundered past the helicopter a few hundred feet overhead, then broke into a sharp climb. “What the hell was that?”
Dombrowski shook his head. “Oh, shit, man! Who told those Navy bastards they had the right-of-way?”
“Navy?” It took Cole a moment for that to register. “Oh, yeah, sure, the flyboys watching the no-fly zone. Man, that guy scared the shit out of me!”
“Guess he got bored flying CAP and decided to come hassle us,” Dombrowski said.
Cole swore and brought the helicopter back on course. “Man, the moment we get back, I’m reporting this one! That guy could’ve smashed us into a cliff with his jet wash!”
But something was nagging at him. According to the op plan he’d seen, the Navy fighters were supposed to fly racecourse tracks out over the sea unless there was a specific reason for them to fly inland. A reason like a no-fly zone violation.
“Dom,” He said, feeling cold. “Get on the horn. Raise Tara. Find out what the hell a Navy F14 is doing in here.”
“Radio silence, LT. Remember?”
“I don’t give a shit about radio silence! I want to know what the hell is going on!”
0930 hours (Zulu +4)
Tomcat 201 UN
No-Fly Zone, Republic of Georgia
“Bird Dog Two, this is One,” Batman called. “Say again your last!”
“One, this is Two,” Dixie’s voice said, harsh with urgency and with the stress of a high-G climb. “Target Sierra One is a Hind gunship. I say again, Hind gunship.”
Batman pulled back on his stick, taking the Tomcat to eighteen thousand feet. His VDI showed three targets now, Mason and Garrity’s F14, the UN helo, and the bandit.
“Cat,” he radioed. “Do you concur?”
“Sorry, Batman. I didn’t see it. We’ve got a Zoo down here in the rocks and I was working my board.”
“Bird Dog One, this is Dixie. I only had a glimpse but it was pretty close. I made the weapons pylons.”
“Do you have it in sight now?”
“Negative,” Dixie replied. “Still in my climb. He’s behind us somewhere.”
At the top of his climb, Batman eased the stick left and put the nose over, lining up the shot. On his HUD, the targeting pipper drifted toward the bandit, moving up the mountain valley. At a range of just over five miles, he still couldn’t actually see the target, but the Tomcat’s computer had painted it on his VDI and again on his heads-up display, a tiny circle of green light. Pipper and circle connected.
“Batman,” Malibu said over the ICS. “I’ve got something from UN Two-seven. It’s garbled… something about they’re under attack.”
“That Hind must be taking shots at them. Tell ‘em the cavalry’s on the way,” Batman said. “I’ve got the bandit lined up. Target lock!”
He decided to go with a heatseeker rather than a radar-guided AMRAAM. With the target between his AWG9 radar and the valley floor, there was too great a chance that the missile would accidentally lock onto the ground instead of the Hind. The helicopter’s engine exhaust was hot, the ground cold. It would make a perfect target beacon for the AIM9.
He snapped a selector switch and immediately heard the high-pitched warble as one of his Sidewinder missiles “saw” the heat emitted by the helicopter.
His thumb closed on the firing switch. “Fox two!” he called, giving the alert that told all friendly aircraft that a heatseeker was in the air.
With a piercing shoosh, a Sidewinder slid free of its rail beneath his starboard wing, streaking toward the valley five miles away. As its exhaust flare dwindled, Batman suddenly remembered the date and broke into a grin behind his oxygen mask.
“Trick or treat, you sons of bitches,” he said.
0930 hours (Zulu +4)
UN Flight 27 UN
No-fly Zone, Republic of Georgia
“You raise Tara yet?” Cole demanded.
“Yea, but things are all screwed up. Sounds like a Chinese fire drill back-” Dombrowski stopped. He’d turned in his seat to illustrate his point and stopped in mid-sentence, staring out of the Black Hawk’s cockpit toward the rear.
“Dom?”
“Shit! Missile! Missile! Incoming!”
Cole acted on instinct alone, bringing the Black Hawk’s nose up and over in a hard turn to the right. No helicopter in the world could outrun a missile; their one chance was to turn into the missile and pray that it smacked into the ground before it could correct.
They almost made it.
The AIM9 Sidewinder streaked in at 660 miles per hour, arrowing down from above and behind the Black Hawk, homing on the bright, hot flares of exhaust spilling from the two engine exhaust shrouds beneath the big four-blade rotor. The missile’s tiny brain was correcting the weapon’s course, bringing the AIM9 up to match the target’s forward vector when it struck… not the engine, but the tip of one whirling rotor blade.
The explosion was shattering, but not as deadly as it might have been if the warhead had detonated inside the target’s engine, as it had been designed to do. Cole felt the aircraft lurch suddenly, and then the helicopter was violently oscillating, the entire ship jerking back and forth with each turn of the rotors. He battled the stick, trying to bring the ship back under control. The landscape was whirling past the cockpit now as the Black Hawk spun dizzyingly into the valley.
It felt as though they’d lost all or most of one rotor blade; the imbalance would tear the engine apart in seconds, but with luck and some decent piloting, Cole thought he might be able to save enough collective to make it to the ground all in one piece. Nursing the engine, battling stick and pitch and collective, he brought the spinning aircraft down. In the last second or two before touchdown, however, the machine started to go over onto its right side, and nothing Cole could do would right it. The spinning rotors chewed into earth and the Black Hawk’s fuselage counterrotated. An instant later, the engine blew, and a ruptured fuel line spilled aviation gas across a red-hot manifold.
They struck hard, plowing into soft earth, the impact softened somewhat by the right-side ESSS crumpling with the crash and breaking away. Cole gasped as he slammed against his safety harness, then again as his seat tore free of its mountings and slammed him forward into the instrument console. The fuselage bounced once, then rolled partly upright; the change in attitude let the pilot seat collapse backward into an approximation of its original position.
Stunned, his chest shrieking agony with each breath, Cole still managed to hit the release and drag himself free of the seat. Dombrowski’s head lolled to the side; Cole couldn’t tell if the copilot was dead or unconscious. Blinking back tears against the pain, he unstrapped Dombrowski, tried to drag him free… and failed. The man’s weight was too much for him to handle with what felt like several broken ribs.
Then Chris Palmer was with him, his face a mask of blood from a nasty cut on his scalp up near his hairline, but otherwise intact. Smoke boiled into the cockpit from the aft cabin.
“The ship’s on fire!” Palmer yelled. “We’ve got to get out!”
“Help me with him!”
Together, they dragged Dombrowski out from between the cockpit seats, aft into smoky darkness, and out the right-side door. They hit muddy earth and kept moving; Cole glanced back once and caught a glimpse of the entire engine housing aflame, as black smoke spilled from the downed aircraft’s interior. A few seconds later, the flames reached the fuel tanks and the Black Hawk erupted in a searing yellow-and-orange fireball that roiled into the morning sky.
The two of them dropped to the ground on either side of Dombrowski’s body, gasping for breath. “God, what happened?” Palmer asked.
“We just got shot down, is what happened,” Cole said. He winced as pain lanced through his side. “Damn, I think we just got shot down by the fucking Navy!”
It was a miracle that any of them had survived.
0933 hours (Zulu 4)
Tomcat 218 UN
No-Fly Zone, Republic of Georgia
Mason pulled up gently, putting his Tomcat into a terrain-hugging flight across the hills. At the far end of his climb-and-turn when the missile had struck, he’d seen the flash and the smoke. Now he was angling back into the valley for a closer look. “Target Sierra One is down!” he radioed, exultant. “Scratch one Hind!”
“Roger that,” Batman replied. “Good spotting, Dixie!”
But Dixie didn’t respond, not immediately. As he passed low over the valley, he had a clear view of the downed helo. Most of the main cabin directly beneath the engine compartment and the twisted, shattered rotors was gone, crumpled up in a fire-blackened skeleton that was rapidly being consumed by fiercely burning flames. The tail section was more or less intact, however, extending out of the fireball at a jaunty angle. He could just make out the words UNITED STATES ARMY stenciled in yellow on the olive-drab paint.
Nearby, a Russian-made Hip Mi-8 was settling to the ground, and figures were running from the open rear door. Then the F14 was past the valley, and he couldn’t see anymore… couldn’t see if there were survivors, couldn’t see the flames.
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