The Ides of Matt 2017

by M. L. Buchman

There was an ominous crack.

  The power pole she was caught on snapped from dry rot, not to mention having a ton and a half of helicopter slam into it.

  The helo dropped, upside down, onto the boulder field close beside the narrow two-lane roadway. That took care of the lethal rotor at least. Menace’s last act was to roll slowly onto its side so that her exit was now blocked by the road’s surface.

  With the death of her console, the information normally projected on the inside of her visor blinked out and took the night-vision gear with it. Amy raised her visor and switched to battery-powered night-vision goggles.

  She lay with one shoulder on the ground, still strapped into her seat. Above her, Bernie dangled in his harness. A finger against his throat confirmed what she already knew.

  She slapped her chest to assure herself that her rifle and survival vest were still there. Then she punched a fist against the harness release and was free.

  Through the cracked glass-laminate of the wide windshield all she could see was boulders and a stretch of road. The canyon was well lit by the blazing truck somewhere out of view behind her. She stood up, impressed that her legs were still working and stuck her head out of Bernie’s door to scan around. She felt like a meerkat popping up out of its burrow to scan for danger.

  Empty road.

  Burning Toyota.

  And the sharp, kerosene-bite of Jet A fuel, not something the Toyota would have along. The Menace, truly dead, was leaking out her life’s blood of highly combustible fuel where a hot exhaust port or turbine engine was bound to ignite it.

  With an apology to the dead pilot, she set the timer on the self-destruct charges for thirty seconds and pulled the pin.

  Amy climbed out, trying not to step on Bernie as she did so.

  She wished she could think of some words to say. Or maybe take his rifle for backup, and any ammo she could grab. Or she could…Get her ass moving!

  A part of her was counting.

  Twenty. Her feet hit the ground.

  Nineteen. She started running.

  Eighteen and a half—her left leg collapsed beneath her.

  “Not good!” she muttered. “Go! Go!” Her leg didn’t seem inclined to answer her command.

  By twelve she had her FN-SCAR rifle free and by ten the stock extended. Faster! It made for a lousy crutch, but by eight she was hobbling away again.

  Along the road would be bad. No cover.

  Climb the steep canyon wall that began close beside the helicopter?

  Height was tactically good, but she didn’t have it in her.

  Instead she raced across the road.

  Almost went down in a pothole the size of Kansas, but recovered.

  At three, ignoring pain, she threw herself off the edge and rolled down the rocky embankment. She crashed into a large boulder close by the water—bad leg first, of course—trying not to scream aloud. The rock was all that kept her from falling into the rushing river.

  At zero, the self-destruct charges pre-mounted on the MH-6M Little Bird Menace fired off. The charge under the console shredded the electronics and shattered the forward sensor array. The second charge, planted close beside the T63 turboshaft engine, destroyed the engine and the rotor shaft. The last two charges blew the two side-mounted miniguns and the unfired missiles to hell, which in turn ignited all of the missiles still in their housing.

  “One kick-ass funeral pyre, Bernie. Sorry, best I could do.” Amy spoke from where she’d managed to get behind a boulder and wait out the rolling wave of fire—a scorching heat she could feel through her heavy flightsuit and the transparent helmet visor. Even with her eyes pressed shut and overloaded with stars of pain from her leg, the flash was bright enough to hurt.

  When the initial blast was done, she lay there a moment longer.

  Five years she’d flown with the 101st Airborne and had never lost a craft. Two more years of intensive training after SOAR had accepted her into the Night Stalkers, still no. And on her first flight as a mission-qualified co-pilot, she was lying wounded along a river in an enemy country where her life expectancy was suddenly very, very short.

  And her helo was rapidly turning into charred garbage.

  They’d assigned Bernie and her to fly rear guard because it was the safest position for her initial sortie.

  Right.

  Hell of a first day.

  Dusty would laugh himself sick when she told him about it.

  Chapter Three

  Chief Warrant Officer Dusty James was as furious as he thought only Amy could make him.

  “That’s my wife back there,” he snarled at Lola Maloney, the commander of the 5th Battalion D Company. She was flying just five rotors ahead of him.

  “It’s up to CSAR. Get off the air,” she snapped back.

  “Combat Search and Rescue, my ass,” he cursed at the radio, though without hitting transmit. Lola Maloney had flown CSAR before she went Night Stalkers, so she was biased in their favor.

  It didn’t help in the slightest that she was right. And that he shouldn’t have risked the radio transmission even on an encrypted channel.

  Already the spot where Amy had dropped off the tactical data feed on the inside of his visor was miles behind them, and the enemy in front of them couldn’t be allowed to gain more ground. He kept his Black Hawk moving at the V-max speed and dove down into the heart of the pass.

  They crossed over into Iran at three meters above the rocky soil. He had a fireteam of four U.S. Rangers and pair of Delta operators aboard. They were all headed to cut off the head of an extremist cell that was racing to a refuge in a country where the U.S. didn’t dare follow.

  Iran had insisted that it could deal with its own problems, but the last few incursions by jihadists from behind the “Hijab Curtain” had gone undetected. Terrorists would strike at the Iraqis, then rush to the Iranian border. There they’d pull on women’s clothes including the head covering of a hijab complete with a veil. They’d then cross the border—undetected by the male guards who were forbidden by Islamic Law from touching another man’s woman.

  If the terrorists made it over the last tortuous ten kilometers of road from the border, they would disappear into the quarter of a million people in the city of Piranshahr, Iran.

  Tonight they wouldn’t be getting away with that. Especially because America’s Number Three Most Wanted was in the group.

  But Amy—

  She had to be alive. No question there, Dusty reassured himself. Too good a pilot, too much of a survivor.

  He nosed down and crept a few rotors closer to LaRue’s helo.

  Get this strike done and then he was going back to find her, no matter what anyone said.

  Chapter Four

  Once her hearing recovered from the blast of destroying her own helicopter, Amy paused to assess.

  Left leg stung like a son of a bitch. Another reason to imagine Dusty laughing. He was the calm one who seldom swore. He’d hardly even cursed when she’d punched him on their first meeting in Portland, Oregon, and landed him in a bed of thorny rose bushes where an old willow tree had stood.

  She was definitely the one with the temper.

  First assessment. She heard nothing but the occasional unexploded round cooking off with a bang: two from the helo, one from the truck still blazing a few hundred meters down the road, then another spatter from the helo.

  No other vehicle sounds. If anyone was hunting her, they were doing it quietly on foot. She’d thought the night-vision gear had been a write-off, but her final dive had merely knocked it aside. She repositioned the four lens system, three of which were still working.

  Rocky valley. Rushing river a dozen meters wide. A lot of rocks and little growth. There were still two heat blooms up over the lip of the embankment.

  Second assessment. Her calf still hurt like…Yeah, Dusty. About like that. She inspected the hole in her flightsuit. No massive entry hole like the 23mm that had bored through Bernie’s helmet.

  Only a 9mm. Exit
hole the same size behind her calf. No blood pouring out or squishing down into her boot, so it wasn’t arterial. She’d been able to walk, which meant the bone was intact. At least before she’d slammed it into the boulder.

  Meat shot. A lucky shot that had slid in through the non-existent door while she was maneuvering; too hyped on adrenaline to feel it. Until now! Holy crap it hurt!

  She pulled a medical wrap out of her first aid chest pouch. Bright white. She did not need to place a banner on her leg that said, “Shoot me here. Again. Please.” But she didn’t have time to peel out of the flightsuit and do this properly.

  Stuffing away the bandage, she dug out a strip of matte-black hundred-mile-an-hour duct tape and wrapped her calf snugly. A quick check revealed no other signs or twinges of injury.

  Okay, time to start surviving.

  One. Don’t be found anywhere near a burning helicopter because they tended to draw a lot of attention.

  Again she listened.

  Nothing.

  She crawled up to pop her head over the edge of the embankment and scanned through her night-vision goggles.

  No one…No one…

  There!

  A single figure on the road. He was staggering and there were the brighter patches of hot blood on his shirt. He must have been blown clear of the truck by the blast. If one was, another could have been. The odds didn’t look good.

  So, Amy slid down the rubble bank toward the river that flowed briskly with the combination of melting snow and a recent spring rain.

  She tightened all the cuffs on her flightsuit to keep out as much water as possible and slid down into the water. While she was at it, she flipped the Velcro covers off the infrared reflector tabs built into her uniform’s shoulders so that they’d show. They’d reflect back an infrared dot into any night-vision gear, if someone who possessed some went looking for her.

  Holy shit it was cold!

  Saddle up, girl!

  She took a deep breath and let the current carry her away.

  Chapter Five

  Focus, Dusty. Focus! You aren’t any good to her dead.

  SOAR made its living in darkness and so close to the ground that no other pilot would risk the same route, not even in broad daylight. It took immense concentration, a highly trained light touch on the controls, and lightning fast reflexes. He wasn’t having any trouble with the latter two.

  The first was being a real issue.

  CSAR had arrived on the scene behind them. They reported one dead truck, one dead helo burned past recognition, and one dead enemy soldier, still clutching his rifle, bled out in the middle of the road halfway between the two.

  The cockpit of the helo only had one body in it, they thought, but it was impossible to tell for sure. No way at all to tell if it was Bernie or Amy.

  No other sign.

  They collected what scrap they could, had tied the biggest remaining chunks of helo that might be identifiable as American onto a long line, and hauled ass back out to Turkey. The U.S. forces weren’t even supposed to be in this part of Iraq anymore, never mind Iran.

  Iran.

  Focus, Dusty. Focus!

  “There!” he called out a half second ahead of his co-pilot. A trio of vehicles moving fast less than two kilometers from, and closing on, the city’s edge.

  “Get me alongside the lead vehicle,” the Delta Force operator called over the intercom from the rear of Dusty’s Black Hawk.

  “Let me just shoot a rocket into each of their—” but Dusty was already moving into place.

  “Won’t achieve the objective,” and Dusty knew the Delta operator was right.

  The primary objective was to stop these guys at all costs. The secondary was to not let it look like it was done by the Americans. A trio of Hellfire missiles would disintegrate the vehicles in an immensely satisfying cloud of shrapnel. But they would also cut craters several meters deep into the road and probably spark an international incident.

  Dusty positioned his Black Hawk alongside the lead vehicle, a hundred meters upslope into the darkness and hugging the terrain. This is why his bird was on this mission. Lola Maloney flew the DAP Hawk, the massively weaponized version of his transport bird. He carried personnel: Delta and Ranger shooters. For the moment, this operation was his.

  “Steady,” was all the Delta said as Dusty held position on the lead. He chose a line of flight that would not intersect the hillside nor lift him up into Iranian radar and smoothed out on the flight controls.

  The vehicles were racing flat-out toward a sharp hairpin curve high on the hillside above the town. Dusty came in as close as he dared, estimating the volume of their roaring engines versus his pounding rotors.

  Over the intercom he heard the sharp spit of a rifle. Once, twice, three times.

  Each in turn, the vehicles swerved badly, right at the heart of the hairpin. Instead of making the corner, the vehicles launched—one after another—off the end of the curve and out into space. After a long fall, they landed in a single heap, or close enough. One caught on fire and the blaze jumped rapidly from vehicle to vehicle. One of the gas tanks exploded.

  Through his night-vision, Dusty could see no figures on the move. No one had survived the crash in good enough shape to escape the fire.

  “Oh, shooting the drivers in the head is so much more subtle.” He couldn’t help harassing the Delta operator. He’d wanted, he’d needed, the satisfaction of blowing the crap out of them himself.

  “I shot the left front tire as each initiated their hairpin turn,” the operator replied. “It is unlikely that will be noticed in the aftermath.”

  Okay, Dusty had to admit that was pretty slick.

  They watched the blaze for another twenty seconds, but still no sign of any survivors.

  Without waiting for instructions, Dusty spun the Black Hawk and pounded back toward the Iraqi border. And Amy.

  Chapter Six

  Amy rode the icy current, cursed the rocks, especially the ones that kept insisting on hitting her bad leg. With each impact, it felt more and more like ice was invading her blood and soon her frozen bones would shatter.

  A stream joined the river and the speed picked up. When it flattened, she swam. When it sped through quick rapids, she did what she could to protect her bad leg.

  The CSAR craft shot by close overhead and she grabbed her radio: no lights, no action.

  She struggled to the muddy bank and a patch of trees. Pulling out a penlight, she saw they were willow trees. It gave her a moment of vertigo-how were they here but Dustin wasn’t? Hadn’t they courted under a willow? But was it this one? It’s leaves were yellow with autumn. But their tree had been winter bare, hadn’t it? Amy recognized the signs of impending shock and forced herself to inspect the problem.

  The problem was that a second 9mm round—one going for her left breast—Dusty’s favorite—had smithereened the radio instead. It was hard to be angry about it. The armor in her vest should have protected her as well, but it would have left one hell of a bruise. And that was if she was lucky.

  Lucky.

  Two years ago she’d met Dusty in the Portland, Oregon, rose garden. The same week she’d started SOAR training. Best two things that had ever happened to her. Too much luck spent there, perhaps. Not enough left over for now when she really needed it.

  Two years married but spent mostly apart, together only when they could both get leave. And finally, assigned together to the 5th Battalion D Company three days ago—the only outfit she knew of in the U.S. Armed Forces that ever allowed couples to serve together.

  And now she was wounded and alone in a mud bank along an Iraqi river.

  Great honeymoon dear. Just perfect.

  Chapter Seven

  Dustin tried not to think about the tactical readout. There should only be two helos on it; himself and Lola Maloney.

  But the readout showed that behind them the Iranians were already up in the air, climbing out of Piranshahr. Thankfully they were too late to see the Black
Hawks. Perhaps they would be distracted by the three burning vehicles off the final hairpin turn above the city and not go looking for American phantoms.

  He and Lola had their Hawks across the border before the first Iranian helos had even reached the city limits.

  However, he could see that up ahead the Iraqis were also airborne and inbound from the west. No one, especially the President of the United States, wanted to be explaining a multiple helicopter incursion by U.S. forces so close to the Iranian border.

  “One sweep of the area,” Lola said over the radio. “Then we’re gone.”

  She was right, one sweep was all they had time for.

  Chapter Eight

  Lying in the mud, Amy calculated her chances and they didn’t look good. She’d floated too close to a town and didn’t know if she’d survive getting back in the water to float further downstream.

  The batteries in her night-vision gear were dying.

  It was cold and the seals on her flightsuit were never meant to replace scuba gear. Shivers were shaking her badly, making it hard to think and to use her hands.

  She managed to dig out the emergency satellite radio and send off a single squirt. Not knowing who was in the area, she didn’t dare do more.

  The batteries in the NVGs died and she might as well be blind. She had more batteries somewhere. Or it seemed she should. In her vest? Thigh pouch? It was getting hard to concentrate. She pulled off her helmet and set it in the mud beside her.

  Darkness.

  Chapter Nine

  Dustin found the last flickers of the burning truck, the dead man in the middle of the road, and the blackened patch surrounded by a wide debris field of tiny bits of Little Bird helicopter.

  He spun down to land nearby and took the risk of calling Amy’s name over the PA mounted on the undercarriage of his machine.