Aggressor

by Nick Cook

  Outside, it was as close to absolute darkness as the desert allowed. Major Bart Bookerman’s lifeline was the FLIR camera in the nose of the helicopter. He had vocal assistance from his crew, whose NVGs – mini-binoculars hinged down over the helmet -picked up on any ambient light, magnifying it thousands of times to turn night into day. Apart from the co-pilot, Karanski, all of the crew wore NGVs. While the FLIR acted as Bookerman’s eyes ahead, his scanners and their NVGs were his peripheral vision. If he started drifting a little too close to the wadi cliffs, they were there to direct him back on course.

  Bookerman loved the MH-53J. Although a big helicopter, it flew like a scout bird. The men liked it, too, because it could get them in and out of bandit country fast and because its three miniguns packed more than enough punch to keep them out of trouble. Thanks to its extensive armour protection, there were very few things which could bring down an MH-53J. A shoulder-launched heat-seeking missile was one of them; a fast, air-to-air armed helicopter was another. Bookerman had been taught every tactic for throwing off fighter helicopters and his ESM/ECM suite was more than capable of jamming or spoofing surface-to-air missiles.

  So much for the theory.

  In the end, their survival boiled down to his ability as a pilot. Right now, he felt sharp, alive. Without the boss peering over his shoulder, his confidence soared. Ulm had assigned himself to Bookerman’s ship for the duration, but in his absence, it was just him and his regular crew, Master Sergeant Alejandro Salva, minigunner and scanner, Staff Sergeant Byron Sweet, second gunner/scanner, and their regular flight engineer, Master Sergeant John Leiffer. Depending on where he was needed most, Leiffer hopped from his jump-seat between the pilot and co-pilot to the ramp at the back of the helicopter, where he stuck his head into the slipstream, scouting for obstructions.

  Bookerman banked the MH-53J around a rock stack and hauled back on the cyclic to align the helo with the narrow wadi ahead.

  ‘GPS has gone again,’ Karanski said matter-of-factly.

  ‘No shit,’ Bookerman said. They’d been having problems with the Global Positioning System. Every time he banked the Pave Low past forty-five degrees in one of these sheer-sided wadis the GPS receiver on top of the fuselage lost its fix on the satellite that beamed them their co-ordinates.

  ‘Inertial nav has got it covered,’ Karanski said, his eyes on the multi-function display in the centre of the instrument panel. Whenever the GPS winked out, the inertial navigation system cut in to keep the mission computer updated on their position. The nav system, some said, was the very heart of the MH-53J Pave Low III. Unless you could plot your way into the target area with pin-point precision, there wasn’t a whole lot of point in taking off.

  Bookerman kept his eyes on the FLIR screen. It took a lot of practice, hundreds of hours hugging the New Mexico desert, or strapped in the mission simulator, learning how to interpret the green and black contrasts of the FLIR. Even now he didn’t find it easy. There was always the temptation to look up out of the window. Whatever happened, though, he had to control that urge. He watched another rock stack form in the centre of the TV screen. Were he to look for it with his bare eyes through the clear Perspex windshield he would find only a wall of blackness, an infinite void. He wouldn’t catch a glimpse of the stack, even as they ploughed into it at close to two hundred miles per hour.

  Of course, if the Pentagon had invested in cockpit lighting that was NVG-compatible, then he could be wearing goggles like the rest of the crew. Were he to wear them, however, the instrument lights on the panel in front of him would fry his eyes as the NVGs turned each innocuous dial into a searchlight. They were due to have had the new lighting installed months ago, but due to the budget cutbacks the programme had stalled. And, of course, because of Panama, the Pathfinders weren’t too high on the Pentagon’s priority funding list.

  The rock stack shot out of the picture. Bookerman felt its presence somewhere off to his right, but he didn’t look up.

  ‘That was pretty fucking close,’ Sweet said over the intercom.

  ‘Don’t fucking swear so much,’ Karanski said. ‘How close?’

  ‘About five feet from our fucking tips,’ Sweet said.

  Karanski turned to Bookerman. ‘Did you get that?’

  Bookerman didn’t answer.

  ‘I said, did you get that, Bart?’

  ‘I got it.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Bookerman’s jaw pounded on the wad of gum between his teeth. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘I’m not overloaded, if that’s what you’re driving at.’

  Sometimes a pilot got so much information thrown at him that his brain could shut out life-or-death information. Bookerman had heard of pilots in the Gulf War who were so wrapped up in their mission that they never even heard the warning shouts of their comrades. A data recorder recovered from a shot-down F-15E in Southern Iraq showed that the WSO had been merrily flying the old precision-guided bomb down the cross-hairs on his TV screen, his mind set on destroying that mobile Scud launcher, while his escort was screaming at him to punch out chaff and flares and take evasive action. The first the F-15E crew knew about it was when the SA-9 flew straight up the right-hand tail-pipe. Thanks and goodnight.

  He adjusted his course fractionally, lining the helicopter up as best he could on the valley’s centre-line.

  Until this mission came along, Bookerman was beginning to think that professional life had passed him by.

  He’d joined the Pathfinders in 1986 after a distinguished, if short, career with Military Airlift Command, flying AC-130 gunships. After transitioning to helos on the UH-1, he gradually moved up to the MH-53J Pave Low III, graduating on CH-3Es and CH-53As along the way. Bookerman had just finished learning everything there was to know about low-level penetration missions at night and in bad weather when Panama came along.

  On that fateful night, he’d inserted Ulm and the rest of the hit team into the jungle without a hitch. As much as he wanted to blame Ulm for what happened at Los Torrijos, he realized that it could have happened to anybody. But the Pentagon wanted a scapegoat and they’d all been tarred with the same brush. C’est la guerre, Bookerman mused. While other USAF Pave Low units were rushed to the Gulf to ready for war, he had had to sit it out in New Mexico, champing at the bit whenever he heard of a coalition aircraft downed behind enemy lines. Rescuing pilots was just one of the many missions for which the Pathfinders had trained him.

  The ultimate humiliation came on the night that Ulm told him, his voice quavering with emotion, that the Pathfinders had been picked to wet-nurse Soviet officers on an exchange programme formulated as part of the politicians’ vision of a New World Order.

  Bookerman was no great fan of the Russians.

  He pulled the helicopter out of the valley and the desert opened up before them.

  ‘How’d we do?’ he asked Karanski.

  The co-pilot peered at the digital read-out on the multi-function display. ‘Thirty-seven seconds out, Bart.’

  ‘Shit!’ Shabanov would have his guts for any timing discrepancy beyond the half-minute mark. He pulled up to a hundred feet and bled off some speed.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Karanski asked.

  ‘What’s our fuel like?’

  ‘Two thousand two hundred gallons.’

  ‘Then we do it again.’

  There were muttered protests from the three scanners. They had been in the air for four hours, most of the time at low level. It was unrelenting work. No one could afford a lapse in concentration. A blink of the eye at the wrong moment and they were all dead.

  Bookerman pushed the stick forward and the helicopter plunged back towards the desert floor. Life at thirty feet. What a bitch.

  ‘Time to first way-point?’ Bookerman asked.

  ‘Two minutes, twenty-three seconds. You should have it on screen any second. I’ve got it on radar.’

  Bookerman screwed up his eyes against the black and gree
n TV picture. There, right on the periphery of the stabilized FLIR camera’s range, was their entry point into the mountain range. The two peaks, known locally as the Devil’s Horns, were so distinct the way their summits arched towards each other. They would show up like neon signs on Karanski’s terrain-following/terrain-avoidance radar screen.

  ‘We’ve got company,’ Leiffer said suddenly.

  When acting as scanner, Leiffer’s position was on the Sikorsky’s rear ramp.

  ‘What kind of company?’ Karanski asked.

  ‘Another helo. About half a mile back. On our six and a little ways out left. He’s tailing us at about five hundred feet.’

  Karanski turned to Bookerman. The skipper’s face was drenched with sweat.

  ‘Are you getting any of this?’ Karanski asked.

  Bookerman kept his eyes glued to the FLIR. He chewed his gum rhythmically. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Any ID on our friend?’ Karanski asked Leiffer.

  No answer.

  ‘Who is that guy back there, John?’ Karanski repeated.

  ‘Can’t tell, sir. There’s a lot of shit from our downwash. I can’t get a clear view. I can see navigation lights reflecting off his rotors, though. It’s a helo, not fixed-wing.’

  ‘I can’t see shit either,’ Sweet said. He was positioned on the wrong side of the helicopter.

  ‘I see him,’ Salva said. ‘Man, he’s right behind us.’

  ‘Come on, Salva. What the fuck is it?’

  ‘It looks like a Hind.’

  ‘Do the Egyptians have any Mi-24s?’ Sweet asked.

  ‘No,’ Karanski said. He looked across to the skip-per again. Bookerman was flying the MH-53J like he was on auto-pilot. ‘It looks like we’ve got an Ivan out back who wants to play games. Do you want to call this thing off?’

  Bookerman’s face glowed in the reflection from the FLIR screen. ‘No. How long to the way-point?’ The valley between the two peaks was a black hole in the centre of the picture.

  ‘About twenty seconds.’

  ‘OK, let’s take him with us.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

  ‘No Ivan’s going to push me around the sky.’

  ‘He’s diving,’ Salva said, excitement in his voice. ‘He’s right down on the deck now. Same height as us. Is this guy crazy or something?’

  ‘This has got to be Shabanov’s idea of an initiative test,’ Bookerman said through clenched teeth. ‘OK, hotshot, eat this.’

  The MH-53J roared between the two peaks into the wadi.

  Karanski logged the way-point. ‘Mark.’

  Bookerman rolled the helicopter into a bend and felt the gs come on. Two times gravity, he calculated, from the way his eyes bulged in their sockets. The very edge of the Sikorsky’s structural tolerances. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He’s still hanging in there - real close, too,’ Leiffer said.

  Bookerman threw the MH-53J into another sharp bend and heard Leiffer’s curse over his headphones as the engineer/scanner was hurled against the wall of the helicopter.

  ‘Check your harnesses, all of you,’ Karanski said.

  Leiffer picked himself off the floor and gave his harness a strong tug. It was still buckled securely to the cabin wall. He crawled back to the half-open loading ramp, his eyes straining against the dust cloud behind them.

  ‘He’s fifty feet behind,’ Leiffer said.

  The nose of the Mi-24J, its blister canopy bulging like insect eyes, edged forward.

  Bookerman swore and advanced the power setting. The new Hind was good. He pushed the Sikorsky lower, until it was ten feet off the deck. ‘How’s that?’

  Leiffer wriggled further into the slipstream. ‘He’s somewhere in the dust storm thrown up by our rotors. He’s got to pull up now. No one can fly in that stuff.’

  Suddenly, there was a warning shout from Sweet. ‘There are freaking camels up ahead.’

  Only then did Bookerman catch them on the FLIR, the camels’ bodies showing up as two giant heatspots in the centre of the picture. ‘Where the fuck did they come from?’ He pulled back on the stick, his mind filled with the FLIR’s negative image of a bedouin roused from sleep, the fear in his features detailed on the edge of the TV screen.

  The Sikorsky was up to two hundred feet before Bookerman even knew it. He pushed the stick for-ward and felt his stomach lurch towards his throat. Two hundred feet on the day and the shoulder-launched SAMs would have him. He had to get down on the deck again, fast.

  ‘We’re approaching the target area,’ Karanski said. He was counting off the miles on the multi-function display in his head.

  From his prone position on the ramp, Leiffer watched, a mixture of fascination and horror on his face, as the nose of the Hind edged out of the maelstrom boiling up behind them.

  He yelled a warning and Bookerman sucked yet more power from the engines. The vibration jarred his teeth, the very marrow of his bones, making even thought laborious. The ground was flashing past so close he felt he could reach out and touch it.

  ‘My God,’ Leiffer said, his eyes locked onto the nose of the Russian gunship. He could see the pilot hunched over his controls in the upper cockpit and the gunner immediately below.

  ‘What the fuck’s happening back there?’ Karanski shouted.

  Leiffer shook himself. ‘He’s still out there.’ He paused. ‘I think he’s trying to get past us.’

  Up ahead the wadi began to widen. Karanski counted down their estimated arrival from the time-on-target function on the Doppler.

  Bookerman tightened his grip on the cyclic and felt the sweat ooze between his gloved fingers.

  ‘Thirty seconds to target,’ Karanski said.

  ‘He’s going past us now,’ Leiffer said. ‘I’m losing him.’

  ‘I’ve got him,’ Sweet said, as the Hind slid alongside his position. ‘Easy as you go, skipper, this guy’s in the fucking hair-cut business. His rotor’s about three feet from ours.’

  The Hind started to pull past them.

  Karanski: ‘Twenty seconds to target.’

  Knowing he had been beaten, Bookerman chopped power and pulled up out of the wadi. ‘Fuck the SAMs, this guy’s trying to get us all killed.’

  The Hind filled Bookerman’s FLIR picture. Beside him, Karanski cranked up the magnification on his FLIR scope so that he had a clear view into the Mil’s cockpit. He fully expected to see the Russian gunner looking over his shoulder and giving them the bird. What he saw instead was pandemonium. The pilot, in the raised rear seat, was crouched over his instruments, hands darting left and right, as he threw switches and checked dials. When the gunner did turn, he was craning for a view of his pilot. Karanski saw that his eyes were wide with fear. The blaze of warning lights across the instrument panel told him why. Suddenly, the Hind pulled up like a striking cobra, its nose pointing towards the stars. Bookerman didn’t even have time to exclaim his surprise. He thought momentarily that the Hind was trying to follow him up into the sky, although later he realized that no helicopter pilot would have tried such a manoeuvre.

  Travelling at close to two hundred miles per hour, the Hind had almost nine times the force of gravity driven through its airframe. Its five blades sheered off at the hub as one, sending the helicopter into a ballistic arc that was cut short by a rock stack jutting out of the desert floor. For some reason, it did not explode, despite the cascade of sparks that lit up the night sky. The impact broke the fuselage in two, the tail boom burying itself in the desert floor of the wadi amid a cloud of dust, the cockpit and cabin flying on another hundred feet before being crushed against the unrelenting face of the wadi’s sides.

  Inside the Sikorsky, nobody spoke for a long time. Bookerman had seen enough to know that there were no surviviors. He pulled the Sikorsky into a turn that would take it back over the crash site.

  Karanski’s burst transmission to Wadi Qena was succinct. They had a helicopter down in the desert.

  Girling walked briskly along the street know
n as Al-Mu’izz, a lone focus among the traders and the faithful. He was the only foreigner in the street, the sole ‘agnabi.

  It was a little before nine. In the distance, he could just hear the muezzin calling from his platform high above the Mu’ayyad mosque. The street traders were already into their stride. Girling tucked his head down and tried to mingle with the droves of men heading for the prayer meeting, but it was impossible to escape the attention of the shopkeepers for long.

  They dangled wares of leather, cotton, silver, and gold before his eyes. Despite their persuasiveness, he steadfastly but politely refused them.

  As he pressed further into the heartland of the old quarter, he began to sense a new mood. The traders looked at him with deepening suspicion. It was as if they knew he had not come to their street to buy. For all his attempts to appear like an innocent tourist - guide-book in his hand and camera round his neck - Girling knew he was fooling nobody. As more and more shopkeepers retreated into the shade of their stalls, their overtures rejected, he imagined he heard the rasp of their curses behind him.

  When he thought about Lazan’s warning and what Mona’s father had told him, he tingled with the realization that the street could swallow him in a moment and no one on the outside would be the wiser, except, perhaps, Sharifa. He had phoned her first thing that morning to tell her he was heading for the Mu’ayyad mosque. When he explained about the Guide, she begged him not to go. But he had made up his mind the previous night and nothing was going to deter him, not even the Mukhabarat. He had slipped from the apartment via the fire escape, neatly avoiding his two minders out the front.

  From the moment he arrived, Girling had known that time was running out, as if Stansell was being kept in a sealed box with a finite supply of air. If the Guide was as powerful as his father-in-law claimed, one word, should he choose to give it, would be enough to secure Stansell’s release.

  Girling raised his eyes to his surroundings. Al-Mu’izz was caught like a trapped nerve between the affluent bustle of the Khan, a few hundred yards away, and the grinding poverty of the City of the Dead, a stone’s throw to the south. The necropolis sprawled somewhere beyond Bab Zuweila, the southern gates of Cairo’s medieval wall. The Mu’ayyad mosque, the Guide’s open prison, nestled in the shade of the gates. On hot days like this, Al-Mu’izz festered like an open sore.