Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista

by Matthew Bracken

  ***

  They were thirty meters above the smashed helicopter. There had scarcely been enough room in the landing zone for one Blackhawk, or as it had turned out, not even enough room for one. Ramos leaned out the open troop door behind the Blackhawk’s crew chief. He could see a pair of camouflage-clad figures below him, trying to climb up and out of the crashed fuselage. Think! To rescue his men, they would need to rig for fast-roping. He hoped that the fast-ropes had been packed, as his squads had been briefed to do. Did his men all bring their thick leather fast-roping gloves? Or could the pilot bring the Blackhawk down close enough to the wreck for his medic to jump directly onto its hulk? Could they descend low enough to jump, without the rotors striking one of the rusty metal obstacles that had brought down Puma 2? Alternatively, they could look for another nearby landing zone, but then his troops would need to make their way back to the wreck on foot, which would take more time. Think! Think!

  He tried to remember where the closest possible landing zone might be, based on his memory of their recent over-flights. Little of this area was flat enough to land on, and most of it was covered in trees. Beyond the woods ahead of them, it became clear but very steep, descending sharply toward sheer cliffs and down into a wide valley with an intricate system of side canyons. He was about to ask his pilot over the intercom where they could land, while he leaned out the open side door. Down the road toward the woods, he saw movement, a flash of white, something that did not belong. What was that? What? A truck? A car? No. What? A plane?

  “There! There, do you see that?” Ramos screamed to his pilot over the intercom. “In the trees, do you see it?”

  “Uh, roger, I see...something. What are your instructions?”

  Ramos hesitated. Should he leave his injured or even dead Falcons, to pursue what might be an optical illusion, a mirage?

  ***

  The Centurion taxied forward, bumping over cracks and ruts. The road curved ahead of them as the trees thinned out and became sparse. They were skidding down slope now, then the road turned hard to the left, and there before them was an almost straight run of road, but it was very short, less than a hundred yards and beyond it there was only sky as the mountain fell away. Logan measured the distance, guess-timated the slope, computed his current and required speed and made his decision. He had already set 20 degrees of flap in readiness, now with his right hand he pushed the throttle knob in all the way, committing them to flight. The hot engine immediately revved up to full emergency power, all 320 turbocharged horsepower screaming, causing the plane to vibrate madly as it leaped forward down the rutted trail.

  ***

  “Falcon leader, this is Puma 3. We’re on our way—we have you in sight. ETA one minute, over.”

  Ramos sighed, grateful that the other pilots had been alert and anticipated his emergency call. “Roger Puma 3.”

  A new voice broke into the net. “Falcon, this is Condor. We have a truck patrol in your area. They should be arriving in about ten minutes, over.”

  Ramos cursed silently. “Condor” was Carlos Guzman, Comandante of the 5th Battalion. His troops were serving as perimeter guards, patrolling the roads on and around the Vedado Ranch. Ramos knew that it was imperative that he get down to Puma 2 before that power-hungry Peruvian bastard arrived on the scene and usurped his authority. On the other hand, he knew that in order to salvage the fiasco that had unfolded below him, he would have to quickly pursue and either capture or destroy the aircraft that he thought he had seen hidden under the trees.

  He made his decision. Ramos switched to “intercom only,” and gave his pilots their orders. “Let’s find the airplane. Follow the road through the trees. Machine gunners: open fire as soon as you have a shot.”

  The Blackhawk dipped its nose, gaining speed racing toward the tree line, leaving the survivors trapped within Puma 2 to await rescue from the other helicopters. In seconds they were over the trees, tracing the ribbon of asphalt that was now clearly visible beneath them. Ramos crouched behind the pilots in the middle, in order to see out of the front windshields as they accelerated across the treetops above the mining road. The trees thinned out, and the mountain ended ahead of them, the land abruptly dropping away. And there it was, just below and ahead of them, a white airplane on the ground, going straight for the edge of the precipice!

  ***

  The Centurion, already rolling downhill, swiftly picked up speed. In seconds, the indicated airspeed was fifty knots as the road made another sharp leftward turn directly ahead of them. They couldn’t possibly follow the turn at this speed, so Logan pulled back on the yoke, and the Centurion staggered drunkenly into the air, its wheels clearing a rusty guardrail by inches. The stall warning horn began blowing even as he pushed the yoke back in, nosing over into the yawning vastness of the red and brown space that opened up below them. He immediately brought the wheels up, and the Cessna began piling on air speed, as it hurtled down toward the earth a thousand feet below.

  ***

  The plane unexpectedly disappeared from Ramos’s view, dropping too low to be seen from his position at the rear of the helicopter’s cockpit. The pilot pushed his cyclic control forward, diving after the white high-winged plane, but Ramos stopped him. “No, no, stay over him, just stay on top of him! On top and behind.” He didn’t know the maximum speed of the small single-engine airplane, but he was almost certain that it was slower than the 200-knot maximum of the Blackhawk. The small planes he had flown in as a boy, before his mother lost her TV job and the money ran out, had cruised at 160 or 170 knots, maximum. The little high-wing Piper Supercub, which the Falcon’s sometimes used for reconnaissance and over-watch, was capable of only 150. If they stayed above the white plane, they would quickly force it down, or get into a position to shoot it down. The prop wash from the Blackhawk’s rotors alone would be enough to drive the plane into the ground if they flew directly above it. There was no possibility that the airplane could escape.

  They were a few hundred meters above and behind the plane when the right-side machine gunner beside him began to fire. He was leaning out of his gunner’s port, the M-60’s barrel aimed forward and down, aiming carefully and then letting go with short bursts, sending golden brass cascading away in the slipstream. The pilot “crabbed” the Blackhawk, flying forward at a leftward-skewed angle, to give his right side gunner a clear field of fire ahead of the craft. Ramos stood behind the gunner, just in front of the open right-side troop door, leaned against the inside of the fuselage for support and put his head outside, blinking against the hurricane until he pulled his clear visor down. Red tracers streaked away from the Blackhawk and all around the fleeing high-winged airplane, yet somehow, it seemed to be actually pulling ahead of them, opening up the distance as it continued to dive!

  He turned back to the cockpit, grasping the high back of the copilot’s seat for balance, and yelled into his intercom, “Pilot, can’t this machine go any faster? They’re getting away! After them! Catch them, catch them!”

  ***

  The Cessna dived, twisted and banked so violently that at several points it nearly rolled its wings beyond vertical. Ranya was looking out of the plane’s rear window, and saw the Blackhawk, a monstrous prehistoric predator looming behind and locked in pursuit, impossibly close. She recognized the red tracers streaking past them, she knew what they meant—she’d seen them before, from the dying end. There was a metallic “twang” that she heard above the engine noise, and a few seconds later, there was another. Logan continued his plunge for the valley floor, building speed while also weaving and jinking, throwing her from side to side against her seat belt.

  The sight of the giant black chopper following behind them filled her with terror. It was coming after her personally, as if madly seeking revenge for its dead brother! She looked forward again, and saw red earth filling the entire front windshield, coming up to meet them, no sky to be seen. At last Logan pulled back on the yoke, mashing her against her seat with the g-forces until they leve
led out and skimmed through a dry river wash. She looked behind again, the insect-like helicopter was a little further back, and much higher.

  The men both had on their headsets; it was no use trying to communicate with them. All she could do was try to control her fear, pray, and hope for the best. Once again, her life was out of her hands, once again she was merely cargo, along for the ride, possibly the last ride of her life. She looked forward, and wished she hadn’t. Directly ahead a curtain of cumulous clouds soared tens of thousand of feet above them, an opaque gray-black wall.

  While she stared at it in wonder, the wall was lit from within by a flash. A lightning bolt shot across the short distance from the bottom of the cloud bar to the ground ahead of them, and a second later the Cessna was struck by an explosive thunder bang. What she saw terrified her, but she could not close her eyes. Sunlight shone through a cleft in the squall line, turning the bottom edges of the clouds to brilliant silver and gold. She glanced between the front seats and could see on the panel in front of Logan that the Cessna was indicating an airspeed of 217 knots.

  The wall of clouds was drawing closer, when she heard the ping, followed by another a second or two later. She looked back—the helicopter was hundreds of yards behind them and above. She looked out the right door window, and saw the jagged tear a few inches back from the front edge of the wing, a yard from the fuselage. The thin aluminum was puckered outward, as if it had been stabbed through by a giant ice pick. A fine mist streamed straight back from the hole. She wondered what would happen if a burning red-phosphorous tracer bullet hit one of the Cessna’s gasoline-filled wing tanks. There was another hole through the flap on the trailing edge of the wing. She shook Alex on his shoulder, and pointed up to the damage. He looked at it briefly, nodded calmly, and then they plunged headlong into the clouds.

  ***

  “Why are you slowing down?” screamed Comandante Ramos. “They’re getting away!”

  “What? Are you blind? Look ahead! ¡Chubascos y Tormentas! Thunder clouds!”

  “But they are going under! Follow them down, follow them!”

  “Are you crazy, follow them into thunder and lightning? There’s no space below the clouds! It’s suicide!”

  “If they can make it, so can we! Catch them!”

  “You’re crazy! You may be a Milicia ‘Comandante,’ but I’m a Major, a real Major, and I’m the captain of this aircraft! I refuse to put our lives in danger for you! It’s madness, and it’s a violation of every safety regulation that—”

  Ramos screamed back, “Hijo de puta, don’t tell me about regulations, you maldito coward!” He snatched the new Glock from his holster, and held it to the pilot’s helmet, his left hand grasping the back of his cockpit seat. “You follow that plane, or I’ll shoot you now, for cowardice in the face of the enemy!”

  “Then shoot, you lunatic! The enemy is not only in that airplane, it’s ahead of us! Look!”

  The white plane disappeared into an opening in the bottom of the wall of clouds, through a notch like an inverted V. The bottom of the clouds now extended to the ground ahead of them, from north to south and obscuring the mountains as far as they could see.

  When they were a half mile from the solid wall of cumulous, the sky suddenly turned dark, and the air temperature plummeted. The helicopter began to be buffeted, shaking and lurching sideways, up, down. There was no way forward, except through the black wall. They were flying at 7,000 feet above sea level, in an area jammed with 11,000-foot mountain peaks. Ramos felt the frigid air blast through the open troop doors, followed by a pelting of freezing cold raindrops, and then hail.

  He looked into the cabin behind him. The Blackhawk’s helmeted crew chief pushed up his visor and stared at him with murder in his eyes. His Falcons were looking away, out of the craft, as stolid and unflinching as if they were taking a daily cross-town bus to work. Some of them were actually grinning, enjoying the moment. Live or die, his beloved Falcons were addicted to danger and excitement, and they were getting plenty of both today. He calmed himself, acceded to reality, and holstered his pistol. “Okay. That’s enough. Let’s go back to Puma 2.”

  The Blackhawk immediately banked and reversed its direction in a tight half circle, its rotor blades popping. The men on the low side leaned outward against their chest straps, and they raced away from the menacing wall of clouds.

  33

  The Cessna punched through the western edge of the cumulous and out into brilliant sunshine, after being tossed up to 14,000 feet by the updrafts. Logan considered them lucky to be alive, lucky to still be flying, but he kept these thoughts to himself. There was no reason to tell them how insanely dangerous it had been to fly into that winking “sucker hole” of blue sky at the base of the thunderheads. Flying into thick cumulous could result in being thrown into a spin or slammed into the ground. Flying into sucker holes in a mountainous region was even stupider. Once flung out of controlled flight by the hurricane-force up and down drafts within the thunderheads, you risked plowing straight into unseen “cumulo-granite.”

  As it was, they’d been pelted with rain and beaten with hail, and had seen a glazing of ice form on their wing’s leading edges. Once through the clouds and bursting back out into brilliant blue, Logan dived again for the cover of the ground, but they quickly determined that they were no longer being pursued. Flying into an ugly squall line that was spitting out thunder and lightning had been a desperation move. It now seemed that the Blackhawk had not been as desperate to pursue them, as they had been to escape.

  They all knew they had been hit. They’d seen the red tracer bullets flashing past; they had heard the pings and snaps. Two exit holes were visible near the wing root on the right side, and they’d lost the right tank’s fuel. Now it seemed like they were losing fuel from the left tank faster than they were burning it.

  Logan had to decide where to go, which meant, where to land. The northern and the central parts of New Mexico were solidly in the grip of the radical state government. He thought that the Navajos in the Four Corners region were neutral, but he had no connections there, nowhere he could get the plane patched up and refueled. Some of the western counties he knew were hotbeds of resistance, he’d heard this from friends who had left the federal agencies, or had been forced out of New Mexico law enforcement. From the rumors he’d heard, no place in New Mexico was more defiant than Cantrell County, south of Gallup along the Arizona border. He guessed the one wing tank of fuel remaining would be plenty to make the distance they’d need to land there, in what he hoped would be friendly territory.

  They had gotten some breaks, he had to admit. They had beaten the pursuit by the Blackhawk, and they had survived penetrating the squall line. The radio scanner was quiet, there was no all points bulletin out statewide to be on the lookout for a white Cessna. They were well north of the line of heliostat radar balloons along the border, which were oriented southward, looking deep into Mexico. In any event, these radar balloons were not very reliable, and they were out of commission more often than not. The right wing tank was empty, but at least the ugly puckering exit hole had not spread or grown. The plane’s controls and instruments were all performing normally.

  “How far can we go on one tank?” asked Alex. They were communicating through their headsets and the attached chin mikes.

  The pilot looked again at the gauge. “We’re showing three quarters in the left tank, maybe thirty gallons, but I think we’re using it too fast. The left tank might be damaged, I can’t tell yet. California’s out, that’s for sure.”

  The ground fell away to their right in brown folds extending to the western horizon. Just to their left and above them was a vertical red and tan escarpment, looking almost like one side of the Grand Canyon, which had somehow lost its opposite twin.

  “How much time have we got? How far?” Alex had an air map partially unfolded on his lap. The GPS display in the center of the instrument panel showed a tiny airplane icon flying south-southwest down the western side
of New Mexico.

  “Ripley’s got a decent municipal airport, we can probably get repaired and refilled there. Punch in FBO Ripley as our destination.”

  Alex found the Ripley airport on his air map, and then worked on the GPS, pushing buttons that expanded the scale of the presentation. He marked the airfield on the GPS and, then hit the “Go To” button. All of the information about the airfield was stored in the GPS’s memory, and was now displayed on the screen. “Okay, here we go. FBO Ripley: 4,800 feet of asphalt runway, at 6,300 feet above sea level. Right now it’s 138 miles away, on course 205 degrees. Can we make it on what we’ve got?”

  “Oh sure,” relied Logan, “We should make it easy, as long as the left tank is reading true. Let me switch to autopilot, and I’ll do a little fuel consumption arithmetic.”

  The plane began to diverge away from the two thousand foot high line of cliffs that had recently been their cover and protection, concealing them from easy observation against the blue sky. A red stone monument soaring as high above the plain as the massive escarpment stood by itself several miles off to the west. The Cessna flew through the open space between the red wall and the towering rock island. They had already flown past a dozen of the imposing rock formations, all different, all magnificent.

  “John Wayne country,” said Alex, briefly turning to face Ranya in the back seat. “I love flying over this part of New Mexico. I always expect to see wagon trains and stage coaches down there.”

  Dirt roads scraped from the barren landscape led to small homesteads, mostly trailers or shacks. Logan believed that the Indians and other hardy souls who eked out livings in the dry and dusty territory below them might have been dirt poor in worldly possessions, but they lived in the midst of some of nature’s supreme beauty. Anywhere else, each of these staggering pinnacles, with sheer sides soaring thousands of feet high, would have been a famous tourist destination in its own right. Only here in this part of the Southwest where there were so many, did these monumental geological formations each exist in relative obscurity.