by Mack Maloney
This was not good. Gillis began crawling back to the cockpit. He'd wished the bags were leaking instead of the gas smell coming from the engines. If they had a fuel leak in the power plants, the possibility of an explosion increased about tenfold.
Gillis had trouble getting back into his seat, that was how much the big chopper was jumping all over the sky now. He looked at the fuel-take-on meter and saw they were only halfway through the refueling. The smell of gas was so bad, and the engines' power dropping so quickly, he couldn't imagine them surviving this flight.
"Should we disconnect?" Ricco yelled over to him.
"We've only taken on five hundred pounds," Gillis yelled back. "That's nowhere near enough. We've got to hang with it!"
So that was what they did. They stayed on course, took on gas for the unit, all the while waiting for the bright flash and the searing flames that would so horribly end their lives.
But it never came. The next two minutes passed like an eternity, but finally, the bladders had reached their full point. Now came the tricky part: disengaging. Ricco started easing the chopper away by reducing throttle. With the precision of a surgeon, he gently began extracting their receptacle probe from the fuel hose.
But then Gillis saw a bright flash off to their right. For a moment he thought he was seeing double. Suddenly he realized there was another plane next to the tanker. Another plane that looked just like it.
Another C-130 . . .
There was another flash. Then another. And another.
It was on that third flash that Gillis finally realized what was going on.
"Damn!" he yelled. "It's the freaking ArcLight!"
Ricco looked up and sure enough, saw the ghostly black gunship riding right next to the refueling tanker. Its guns were blazing away at it.
"Christ! Disconnect!" Gillis was yelling.
Purely on reaction, Ricco hit the full-disengage button. The Hook's receptacle opened up and the tanker's fuel hose came out, spraying aviation gas everywhere.
The tanker blew up an instant later.
The explosion was blinding. All Gillis could see were pieces of metal and wire and glass flying right at him, all of it on fire.
Somehow Ricco was able to pitch the big chopper away from the gigantic fireball. But it was a very violent maneuver. The fuel bags went one way and the chopper went another, and soon they were looking straight down at the Persian Gulf rushing up at them.
"This is not good!" Gillis was yelling out.
Ricco was battling the controls, but it was already hopeless. The Hook was falling way too fast and weighed too much to get under control.
They'd lost all sight of the ArcLight by now. The sky around them was filled with the burning debris of the C-130 tanker plane. And they were falling with it, very rapidly.
It was strange then, because Ricco just looked over at Gillis and extended his hand. Gillis took it and shook it heartily.
"Sorry, buddy," Ricco said. "I really am. . . ."
Gillis just shook his head as the Hook went nose-over.
"Not your fault, pal," he said calmly. "Not at all . . ."
Chapter 24
If possible, things were even worse back at the Bat Cave.
It was now 0630 hours. The fuel chopper was so overdue, the unit had given up on it.
What had happened to the Pumper? There was no way of knowing. The unit had no means of getting the Hook on the radio or of getting a message sent by the fuel chopper back to them.
But an even larger problem had arisen.
By an incredible stroke of bad luck, there had been a traffic accident on the one section of the desolate highway that ran closest to the mouth of the cave on Ka-el. It had happened about an hour after the fuel chopper left. A large truck carrying some kind of liquid had flipped over on the curve, completely blocking the roadway not a half mile from the base of the mountain.
The screech of the truck's brakes had nearly deafened the Marines monitoring the listening devices along the cliff's edge. Immediately turning their NightScopes oh the wreck, they saw the driver stumble from his smashed cab and collapse on the side of the road. The Marines simply couldn't believe it. The first vehicle of any type to travel the highway since the unit reached the cave had crashed just a sneeze's length away from their hideout.
Smitz, Chou, Norton, and Delaney were immediately summoned to the ledge. Scanning the area with powerful NightScope binoculars, they could see the truck couldn't have wound up in a worse position: lengthwise, with its cab lodged firmly between two boulders on the north side of the highway and its trailer, twisted and split in two, dug deeply into the asphalt on the south side. The truck was also leaking something—maybe even gasoline, ironically enough. If that ignited, the glow would be seen for miles.
Norton and the others were appraising this sudden crisis when another ominous noise was picked up by the Marines' super-long-range eavesdropping devices. This was a low rumbling sound, mixed with the hum of generator-produced electrical energy. The Marines had heard this combination before. It was the sound of many heavy vehicles moving at once.
All NightScopes turned west, and sure enough, coming over the next hill were the lead elements of an Iraqi military column. With twenty-one T-72 tanks on flatbed trucks out front and dozens of troop trucks bringing up the rear, it was at least a battalion on the move. As the Americans watched helplessly, the column slowly approached the accident site. The lead truck nearly plowed into the wreck. This caused a series of bumper strikes and a storm of screeching brakes all along the convoy. In this manner, the column came to an abrupt stop.
That had been nearly thirty minutes ago, just as the sky was beginning to brighten. Now the highway was simply jammed with Iraqi military vehicles and their occupants, many of whom were out and walking around, trying to figure a way to dislodge the wrecked truck from the roadway.
But it was clear, even from a half mile away, that the Iraqis didn't have a clue what to do. The crashed truck's front half was wedged so firmly between the two rocks, no amount of pulling and pushing could budge it. The trailer itself was so deeply embedded into the macadam, even a hundred men could not move it either. And apparently there was no means to get one of the tanks off its flatbed to do the job.
So, short of turning the column around, the Iraqis were stuck.
All this put the Americans in a very precarious position. They had no fuel left in their choppers, and with no choppers they had no way to get off the cliff. If the Iraqis happened to spot them, it would be a bloodbath. Just the tanks alone carried enough firepower to take out the cave, the cliff, and everyone on it. And if that didn't work, the column's commanders could call in air strikes to finish the job.
What made the whole thing excruciating, though, was the fear that by some cruel miracle, Ricco and Gillis would finally show up. The irony of that possibility was as thick as the early morning mist now rising from the desert. If the tanker pilots didn't return, that meant something catastrophic had happened to them and the unit was stranded. But if by some act of God they did appear, the unit's position would undoubtedly be compromised—and they would be trapped and discovered.
Either way, it would be a disaster.
*****
Of course, there was also the possibility of a third scenario.
"You know, those assholes Ricco and Gillis could have just cut out on us and landed somewhere friendly," Delaney hissed over to Norton as they remained crouched in a hidden position along the cliff's edge.
It was now nearly 0700 hours. The sun was almost up, it was even getting hot. The Hook was more than ninety minutes overdue. Norton was still scanning the highway. The Iraqis appeared to be getting a bit restless.
"If that's what those two did, I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand their temptation," he told Delaney finally. "A few hundred miles in any direction and they're out of this bad dream for good."
Delaney just shook his head. "Think they'd have the balls to do it, Jazz? To just to leave us
here?" he wondered.
Norton lowered his electronic spyglasses.
"Match it up with what Angel told us," he said, his voice a whisper. "No one who cares knows where we are. If it all ends here for us, who will really give a fuck? In fact, it would be a big help for the people who put us in this wringer in the first place."
Delaney gritted his teeth as he mulled over Norton's grim words.
"I'll haunt those bastards if they turned tail," Delaney said finally. "Their families won't know a minute of peace. I'll be throwing pots around their kitchen; bleeding through their walls. I'll scare the shit out of their kids on a daily basis. I'll be one bad-ass ghost."
"Well, if they did run away, it would actually be better for us than if they showed up now," Norton said. "That looks like half the Iraqi Army out there."
No sooner were those words out of Norton's mouth when Chou ran up to their position, landing in a skid on his chest, knees, and stomach. He was out of breath, covered with dust, his face uncharacteristically dirty.
"My guys just spotted something on the big scope," he gasped. "Sixty degrees east, twenty south . . . below two hundred feet."
Norton put his glasses up and zeroed in on Chou's coordinates. And that was when he saw it. A pinprick of light coming out of the early dawn clouds, heading straight for them.
"Damn . . . is it really . . . ?" Norton breathed.
It was the Hook. Even head-on, the huge chopper's profile was unmistakable. But even from this distance it was obvious the chopper was in bad shape. It was trailing heavy smoke and barely flying no more than two hundred feet off the ground.
Even worse, it was heading right for the mountain in full view of the Iraqis on the highway.
Delaney grabbed the glasses and spotted the chopper as well.
"I'll be damned," he said. "Now those guys decide to be heroes?"
"Well, that's the end of this ballgame," Chou said. "You might as well get a neon sign and point it at us."
He looked around. "Anyone have any bright ideas?" he asked.
No one said a word. There was nothing they could do.
"We've got to let them land," Norton said finally. "If they don't crash first."
"Yeah, but if they set down here, we'll have a thousand Gomers on top of us before we know it," Delaney replied.
Chou lowered his glasses, turned, and yelled an order to his men. It sounded ominous, like "last-ditch defense posture," or words to that effect. The Marines immediately snapped to. They jumped from their various hiding spots and clustered together, visors down, weapons ready, in a forward trench they'd dug previously along the edge of the cliff. They looked like doughboys awaiting an attack across the fields of the Somme.
"Man, this is getting a bit too dramatic for me," Delaney whispered, checking his own M-16.
"Take notes then," Norton told him. "It will make good copy for your memoirs."
It took about another minute, but the Hook finally went right over the stalled Iraqi column, leaving behind a trail of sparks and very heavy smoke. It did a bone-charring turn to the right and fluttered its way towards the cliff.
While the others watched the stricken chopper, Norton kept his scope on the Iraqis on the highway. Those soldiers he could see looked absolutely baffled. To their eyes, they were looking at one of their own choppers in trouble. But how long would that incorrect assumption last?
When Norton looked up again, the Hook was only a hundred feet out from the cliff's edge. It was obvious the refueler only had a few more seconds of flying left in it.
So in it came. One engine on fire, the other backfiring like a bad '55 Chevy. It went into a brief hover just above the far lip of the cliff. There was so much smoke pouring out of the chopper, it created a huge black smoke screen that was blowing down with great force on all those waiting below.
"NBW masks!" Chou yelled, and quickly his men were pulling down their gas masks. But Norton and Delaney had no such protection. They were soon engulfed by the maelstrom of exhaust and smoke.
"Jeesuz!" Delaney yelled. "They're still trying to kill us, those bastards!"
The Hook came crashing down a second later, not a hundred feet from the trench line. The entire mountain shook from the impact. Everyone hit the deck. The noise was unbearable. Screeching, grinding, the scream of metal twisting as the huge rotor buried itself deep into the hard rock of the cliff. This was all mixed with a bizarre sound similar to that of many huge waves hitting a beach in rapid succession. It was the gas inside the Hook's fuel bags, dangerously sloshing about. Now the cliff was suddenly thick with gas fumes as well as smoke and exhaust.
"Jeesuz!" Chou cried out. "They actually got the fuel?"
"Those guys are nuts flying that thing back here!" Delaney added to the din. "One spark and this whole fucking mountain will go up!"
The next thing he knew, Norton was on his feet, running towards the wreck. Air techs were scrambling out of the cave, many with fire extinguishers in hand. They quickly began hosing down the burning aircraft. But there was no sign of movement in the cockpit.
In seconds Norton was boosting himself up onto the twisted wing of the Hook, Delaney close behind. The lower side access door was crumpled. There would be no way of getting in from there. Smoke was pouring from the main cargo bay door. That way was blocked too. Norton only had one other choice. He climbed up to the top of the fuselage and crawled over to the cockpit window itself. He peered inside. He could see Ricco and Gillis, slumped over, still strapped in their seats. They looked dead. The fumes were nearly overwhelming.
Now Delaney was at his side, and together they began pounding on the cockpit glass with their rifle butts. But the strong panes would not budge. No surprise. They were bullet-proof just like the glass on the Hinds.
"What should we do?" Delaney was yelling over at Norton. "We can't shoot it out!"
Suddenly, a fire ax appeared between them. It hit one window with such force, the glass exploded into thousands of pieces. They looked down and saw Smitz standing on the twisted nose below. There was a fire in his eye they'd never seen before.
"C'mon!" he was yelling. "Get them out of there!"
Norton reached through the busted window and grabbed Ricco by the scruff of his neck. The window frame was just large enough to squeeze the injured pilot out, but it was like pulling deadweight. It took all of his strength, but somehow Norton managed to extract him.
Then Smitz hit the next window over with the ax; it too burst in a cloud of tiny pieces. Delaney reached in this hole and pulled Gillis's long lanky frame out. All around them, the air techs were dousing them and the chopper with mountains of foam. The heavy smoke was everywhere—which was a good thing. The haze was so thick it prevented the Iraqis on the highway from seeing the rescue efforts.
Yet no sooner had they lowered both pilots to the ground when Chou ran up. He was coughing from the fumes and smoke; so much, he couldn't talk. So he just pointed to the highway. Norton took one look and immediately felt his heart sink to his boots. A half-dozen trucks had split away from the Iraqi column and were racing for the cliff at full speed.
"We got about five minutes before they get here," Chou finally spat out. "Maybe another five before they realize we ain't towelheads and radio back to the column. Then we're fucked!"
Smitz took a few seconds to appraise the situation, and then nodded in grim agreement.
"There's only one thing we can do," he said.
He turned to the cluster of air techs surrounding the wrecked fuel chopper and yelled his next order at the top of his lungs.
"Start pumping this gas out—now!"
*****
Lieutenant Ali Alida el-Sheesh had had a very long day.
He was the officer in charge of the engineering unit attached to the column that was now stalled on Highway 55.
The column had left Abu Ahl earlier the day before, and had been traveling for more than twenty hours when they came upon the jackknifed truck. It was a delay they could not afford. The co
lumn was already overdue for exercises in Dawrah, which was a suburb of Baghdad itself. Several troop trucks had already broken down, costing time and patience as the column's commanding officer, the hated Major Tariq Tziz, pondered over which trucks should be fixed and which ones simply pushed to the side of the road to be collected later. The decision on whether a truck was fixable actually came down to Lieutenant Ali and his men. They were called engineers, but in effect they were glorified mechanics. Whenever anything went wrong with the column's vehicles, Major Tziz would call on Ali's troop—and Allah help them if the work wasn't done quickly and efficiently.
So the radio call went back to Ali when the column came upon the overturned truck. Tziz was screaming in the microphone at him as usual, telling him to hurry up. But the top officer had no idea what it was like for Ali to get his men and equipment from the end of the convoy all the way up to the front. Engineers should always be placed at the front of the column, but Tziz considered them too low-class for such an exalted position.
When Ali finally reached the scene of the truck's accident, he was stumped. The truck was twisted in such a way that it could not be straightened out either mechanically or manually. Its gas tank was leaking fuel everywhere, and there was a great danger of fire. So the first thing Ali did was have his men cover the fuel on the roadway with sand. But how to move the huge eighteen-wheel beast? He didn't have a clue.
After studying the situation with Major Tziz and his bad breath breathing down his neck, Ali came to only one conclusion. They couldn't push the truck without significant damage to their own vehicles—even one of the tanks would have a hard time with it, even if they could get one down off its flatbed. They couldn't blow the truck up, as that might damage the road to the extent that the column could not pass at all. They couldn't radio back for a heavy towing vehicle from Abu Ahl, as that would take too long.