by Jack Du Brul
He wasn’t worried that they would actually evade him. Two choppers armed with heavy machine guns would be taking off from the Hatcherly facility within a few minutes. The JetRanger would be trapped between them, allowing him to respect what they’d accomplished without worrying about long-term damage if they did escape to tell their tale.
At the warehouse a few nights earlier, Captain Chen had suggested that the force who’d infiltrated the port was a local gang of thieves or gunrunners. Watching as the JetRanger was pulled deeper into the storm, Huai knew that he was facing something else entirely. These people fought like trained commandos. His first instinct was American Special Forces, SEALs, or maybe Marine Recon-a chilling thought because it meant their security was blown. Liu Yousheng had kept Operation Red Island well compartmentalized and yet Huai knew that if the Americans were onto even this part of it, the entire mission might be finished. Destroying the chopper and its occupants was of primary concern, but equally important to Huai was identifying the commandos. While he knew they wouldn’t be carrying any identification, he was familiar with other, subtler signs that would give away their nationality. Types of uniforms, equipment and weaponry could be false flags, while a corpse couldn’t hide its skin color, tattoos or dentistry.
With his helo closing the gap to the fleeing JetRanger, Huai thought about his report to Captain Chen. Chen had turned into a real bastard since his screwup at the warehouse. He was looking to shed some of the blame onto his men and he’d like nothing more than tearing Huai apart for this latest lapse if only to regain Liu Yousheng’s favor. Not that Huai believed the Hatcherly executive would be impressed that Chen could yell at one of his own men. Huai thought he understood Liu. The official wanted results and didn’t care how he got them. So long as the JetRanger was destroyed, he wouldn’t be bothered with the details.
And taking down the enemy chopper was only a matter of time.
Gasping to regain his breath, Mercer finally rolled out from under the others in the cramped hold of the JetRanger. His uniform was soaked after only a few minutes in the deluge and more rain continued to whip through the open door frames. An occasional burst of lightning seared his vision. His first concern was Lauren.
“Are you all right?” he yelled over the engine noise and the steady pounding of rain. He helped her into a sitting position.
She looked miserable with her hair plastered against her head yet threw him a saucy smile. “Never better. How about you?”
“I owe you one for the boat. If not for your fancy driving, I would have gone overboard.”
Lauren disregarded the praise. “Your head okay?”
Mercer fingered the knot at the back of his skull. His hands came away bloody but he knew the wound wasn’t bad. “It will be after a stitch or three.” He looked to where Bruneseau sat with his back against the rear bulkhead. A burst of anger made him forget the minor cut in his scalp. “You gonna tell me what the hell you were playing at back there?”
The French agent began to slide over to where he could climb into the cockpit. “Later,” he said brusquely. “We’re not clear yet.”
“Hold it.” Lauren shifted her position to block the spy. “Do you know how to fly a chopper?”
“No.”
“Let me up front. These missing doors are killing our aerodynamics and speed. The Chinese helo’s gonna be on us soon. Your pilot will need the extra set of hands.”
“You fly?” Mercer asked.
She nodded, pleased that this skill seemed to impress him. “My rotary ticket hasn’t been punched in a few years, but. .”
“Okay,” Rene said after a moment’s thought. While Lauren crawled into the cockpit, Bruneseau pulled two pairs of headphones from a rack and handed one to Mercer. With his face a blank mask, Foch worked on the weapons, filling magazines from those that were half depleted. Mercer wasn’t surprised by how hard he was taking the deaths of his two men. The Legion prided itself on its esprit de corps and its unwavering dedication to its own. The loss was devastating.
Once on the comm loop Bruneseau asked the pilot, an Aussie named Carlson, about their situation.
“We have maybe five minutes on the other chopper, sir,” he replied in French with an Australian twang. “Looked like a Gazelle to me. She’s faster than us and we can’t hide in this storm forever.”
“Options.”
The JetRanger shuddered and lost fifty feet in a sudden downdraft. The winds whipped predominantly from their left but gusts came from every direction. The storm had turned the leaden sky into a riot. Lauren sat in the right seat with her hands hovering over the controls, ready to assist Carlson at any moment. She asked that they speak in English.
“We are talking about our options, Captain Vanik,” Carlson said. “The Chinese Gazelle is closing and this storm won’t cover us all the way to our base at Chepo.”
“Don’t forget,” Mercer interrupted, “they’ll probably have choppers at the port. If Liu’s smart, he’ll have them airborne and on an intercept course.”
“Proverbial rock and hard place,” the pilot said.
Lauren was the first to develop a plan. “Forget Chepo. It’s too isolated. We’ll fly the ridge of the continental divide. If we’re lucky we can lose the Gazelle and head to Panama City from the west after crossing the canal. If Liu’s other choppers manage to catch us they’ll have to disengage once we’re within radar coverage of Tocumen Airport.”
“You mean to outflank the inbound helos from the port?” Mercer pictured a map of Panama in his head and followed Lauren’s course.
“If they find us over open ground, we’re dead. We need to reach an area where they won’t be so anxious to shoot us down.”
“Do it,” Bruneseau ordered.
Carlson banked northward and tentatively dumped altitude, he and Lauren both straining to peer around the curtains of rain for the mountains that ran like a spine through Panama. Foch had shortened the rappelling ropes to create safety belts for himself, Mercer, and Bruneseau and now sat facing backward with his FAMAS on his lap. Trusting the pilot, but Lauren more so, Mercer joined him on the floor and covered the other open door, watching their tail for the first sign of Hatcherly’s Gazelle. They could see perhaps a half mile into the storm, and occasionally one would tense as they thought they spied something solid emerge from the towering clouds, only to relax again as the phantom merged back into the tempest.
With their circuitous route, it would take more than an hour to reach the canal and another few minutes to reach the shelter of Panama City.
Once they found an altitude where they could judge the topography, the pilot took them into the valleys that twisted through the continental divide, maintaining a dangerous proximity to the jungled hills. With each steep bank, Mercer felt his straps dig into his flesh, forcing him to grab a handhold to maintain his balance. It was like riding backward on a roller coaster only there were no tracks. One moment he was thrust halfway through the yawning door frame and the next he was lifted bodily toward the hold’s ceiling or dumped into Bruneseau, who hunched between the pilots’ seats. Not a roller coaster, he thought. A turbine-powered rodeo bull.
Only Lauren and Carlson spoke as they continued toward the canal, short sentences of arcane aviation language that Mercer didn’t bother to follow. He kept all his concentration on their tail. After thirty minutes his vigilance hadn’t flagged. Until they were safely on the ground again, he wouldn’t let himself believe they’d lost the Gazelle. So he continued to scan the sky, waiting, hoping he didn’t-
“There!” he shouted as the pursuing Gazelle burst from a wall of clouds into a small clearing in the storm. For a moment its wet paint gleamed before it plunged into a bank of fog.
“How far back?” Lauren’s tone was composed, a sharp contrast to Mercer’s frantic yell.
“Hard to tell. Maybe a quarter mile.” Mercer felt the JetRanger fall lower into a valley, its whirling blades less than a hundred feet from the overgrown flanks of a nameless mountain
.
“Hold on,” Carlson said after he’d already thrown the chopper into aerobatic maneuvers its builders never intended. His control over the JetRanger was masterful.
So was that of the Chinese pilot of the Gazelle chasing after him.
The surreal game of cat and mouse was played amid the folds of the earth and the rain-laden clouds of the tropical storm, two areas any sane pilot would avoid. Instead Carlson flew deeper into both, dogged by the Gazelle. Fifteen minutes further into the chase, with the canal another ten minutes away, submachine-gun fire was added to the equation.
Foch was the one who saw the fire coming from the other helicopter. With the extreme range, he was unconcerned and only motioned to Mercer about it without disturbing the two pilots. For the moment there was nothing they could do. Both watched the sleek Gazelle follow their trail like a bloodhound on a scent, a perfect mirror of every movement Carlson made and every turn Lauren pointed out.
Neither noticed the two other shapes flying in a loose formation that appeared through the storm until they opened up with door-mounted.30 calibers. Two streams of tracer fire cut directly behind the JetRanger, laserlike streaks of light that Carlson recognized. He threw the helicopter over so quickly that Foch was left dangling in space before the floor of the cargo hold pivoted back underneath him. The next spray of fire sliced the air where the JetRanger had been a second earlier.
The lead chopper, the Bell that had dropped the depth charges at the lake, swung in between the Gazelle and the Legionnaires’ helo while the other slid behind Sergeant Huai’s aircraft in a line astern formation. The door gunner could only get a bead on his target when they made sharp turns and even then he had only scant seconds before his own craft followed the other around and his angle was lost.
Foch fired off a few rounds. At five hundred yards, he had no hope of hitting his target; he just wanted the pursuing pilot to know his quarry had fangs.
“Now what?” Bruneseau spoke for the first time in half an hour.
“How about we pray they get struck by lightning,” Lauren said tightly. For a while she’d been helping Carlson with the controls, compensating for the storm’s turbulence while he kept them on course. “Or they strike it!”
Cutting across the valley was a high-tension electrical line, a power feed from the Madden Dam only three miles to the south. From this distance the transmission cable was as slender as a thread and Lauren would have missed it if not for the large rubber balls spaced across its length as a warning to low-flying aircraft. Intuitively, Carlson knew what she meant and kept the JetRanger on course and at an altitude to crash into the power line. If the pilot behind them was following normal procedures he’d be searching the sky for such obstacles but Lauren prayed he was too intent on the hunt.
At ninety knots, and in uneven wind conditions, Carlson got as close as he dared before lifting the JetRanger up and over the cable. The chopper’s skids cleared the line by eleven feet and he immediately dropped them back to his original altitude in hopes of tricking his pursuer that his maneuver had been the result of wind sheer.
Carlson had had fifteen seconds to prepare for the maneuver. The pilot behind him had four. Nowhere near enough time.
Only when the chopper he was chasing rose suddenly did the Chinese pilot see the red-colored sphere its bulk had hidden. He had an instant to notice the others strung across the valley like beads. Training told him to dive, to allow gravity to assist him as he tried to avoid the obstacle, but instinct overrode this and he heaved back on the cyclic and stomped the rudder to compensate. The chopper’s skids hit the line. In a light-speed blink, a finger of electricity jumped into the gunship, opening the path for tens of thousands of volts seeking ground. There was no place for it to discharge so the power continued to pour into the crippled craft that dangled from the sagging cable. Delicate electronics were fried first, and that included the electrical impulses in the brains of its occupants, the synaptic bursts that created thought.
Brains were boiled within skulls, blood within tissue, skin within clothing and finally the aluminum body of the helicopter began to melt. The blinding arcs of electricity and the pop of air exploding from the thermal onslaught erupted from behind a mist of ozone, charred metal and flesh. The chopper burned like a meteor when it finally dropped from the power line and plowed into the storm-swollen stream in the valley’s floor.
The Gazelle and the second gunship were forced to break away to avoid the flaming wreck, giving the Legionnaire team a few moments’ respite. Carlson, Bruneseau, and Mercer each congratulated Lauren for the maneuver even if it was the pilot who’d pulled it off.
They linked up with the Chagres River, the main source of water that fed the Panama Canal, about two miles before it spilled into the man-made waterway. They were still twenty-five miles from Panama City and no one felt the earlier confidence that the choppers would break off the chase once they reached the town.
“Oh, merde!” Foch screamed as the second gunship flashed into view. It flew at a slight angle so the door gunner could bring his.30 caliber to bear.
The first blast missed the JetRanger by a few feet. The second came almost immediately and ripped into the tail, producing the metallic snarl of hardened ammunition meeting delicate machinery. By the time Foch leaned out to look for the gunship, it had swooped out of view.
“Mercer, your side.”
Mercer felt more than saw the black shape settle in off the starboard side of the helicopter. Before he was certain, he fired anyway. His assault rifle felt puny compared to the barrage that slammed the chopper again. Heavy rounds passed right through the open cargo door and several more ripped into the metal that protected the JetRanger’s critical main transmission.
“Lauren, get us on the deck,” he yelled, changing out an empty magazine.
In a gut-wrenching dive, the chopper raced for the swollen waters of the Chagres, coming level only when they were mere feet from its boiling surface. Almost immediately Carlson popped up again as they leaped over a trestle bridge that supported the trans-isthmus railroad and one lane of automobile traffic. Had a train been on the bridge they would have smeared themselves against its side.
About to turn to the left toward the Gaillard Cut and Panama City, Carlson saw that the Gazelle had managed to cut him off and hung just above the canal with a cluster of armed troopers at its open door. Six assault rifles opened as one, six bright eyes that continued to wink as the first of the 5.8mm rounds found their mark. He jinked as bullets cut through the Plexiglas canopy, managing to keep everyone alive for a moment longer.
Here the canal was flanked by gentle slopes that had been recently peeled back in an effort to stem the remorseless avalanches that had plagued the waterway since its construction. It resembled a lazy river more than an engineering marvel. Still, Carlson couldn’t trade off his speed for altitude to pull them out of the canal.
He cut right, away from civilization, and had to swing around a massive container ship headed toward the canal’s choke point at Gaillard.
From the door of the chopper hurtling just fifteen feet above the green water, the container ship appeared to be a solid wall of black steel and multicolored containers that seemed to stretch to the horizon. The cargo vessel’s wing bridge towered sixty feet above them. A burst from the gunship missed the JetRanger and exploded in a blossom of ricochets against the ship’s thick hide.
While the canal’s locks were one thousand feet long and more than a hundred wide, her builders had envisioned several ships at once passing into them, not vessels built to the lock’s monolithic proportions. Even with the widening of the Gaillard Cut to 624 feet, the original plan of continuous two-way traffic had been abandoned. Navigation was too tricky to allow the PANAMAX ships, those vessels designed specifically to maximize the space in the locks, to pass each other in the canal’s tightest point. As a result, PANAMAX freighters, tankers and even the new fleets of super cruise liners transited in daylight hours and only in one direction
at a time, while smaller ships used the canal at night and could transit in either direction.
No sooner had the JetRanger rocketed past the stern of the container ship than she had to swing wide to avoid a tanker headed straight for her. Rising from the mist beyond was an eighty-thousand-ton cruise ship glistening like a white wedding cake. It was a procession of Goliaths.
“Where now?” Carlson asked over the intercom, his voice tight even as his hands on the controls remained relaxed.
“Stay away from the cruise ship,” Lauren answered. “We can’t risk them getting caught in a cross fire.”
Bruneseau grunted as if he thought using the passenger vessel as cover was a good idea.
“Right,” the Aussie said.
“How about Gamboa?” Mercer suggested. He’d seen the town on the map and knew it was the headquarters for the canal’s dredging operation. He hoped there was a chopper pad or field nearby where they could set down.
Lauren agreed. “Better than anything else out here.” The recently leveled banks were too exposed to gunfire from above to risk a landing.
In the five-hundred-yard gap between the tanker and the cruise ship, the Chinese helicopter came at them again. This time the chopper angled in so the door gunner could fire down at the JetRanger. Much of the barrage hit the water like so many pebbles tossed into a pond, but enough bullets hit the helo to cause a skip in the engine.
“Oil pressure dropping,” Carlson said. “That burst was fatal.”
Gamboa was a half mile farther up the canal.
Resisting the urge to fire up at the gunship because his bullets would hit their own spinning rotor, Mercer was impotent as another blast of.30 caliber sprayed across the JetRanger. Like magic, small holes appeared in the ceiling and floor of the helo as rounds passed right through. One was only three inches from where he crouched and he could smell the scorched metal before the odor was whipped away. The turbine’s steady whine deepened. It was grinding against itself, unbalanced and ready to come apart.