by John Weisman
“Up to you,” Ritzik said. “You do as much as you feel comfortable doing.”
“Got it.”
“Good.” Ritzik looked up and peered through the windshield. His hand found the radio dial and he switched to the insertion-team net frequency. “Mick—”
He watched Mickey D’s head go up and down. “Yo?”
“Your eleven o’clock, about nine, ten miles out.”
There was a three-second pause. Then: “Roger that, Loner. I see the dust trail.”
“Drop down some. Stay low—where they won’t see us or hear us for a while.”
The pilot’s head went up and down. But by the time he’d said, “Wilco,” Ritzik had already switched frequencies. He steadied himself as the big chopper slowed and lost altitude. “TOC, Loner—I need an update on the incoming flight.”
Ritzik waited for a reply. “TOC—Loner.” He transmitted the call sign a third, fourth, and fifth time. But all he heard in his earpiece was white noise.
125 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.
0854 Hours Local Time.
“CURTIS, can you and Goose give me a hand?” Tracy WeiLiu had reached a critical stage of the disassembly. She’d unbolted the capacitor bank from the body of the MADM, then disconnected the fuse wires running from the energy cells into the Pentolite, easing the wires millimeter by millimeter from the capacitors. That had been the most problematic element of the exercise because there was no way of measuring whether or not any of the capacitors’ latent energy remained in the wiring. More to the point, the core of the fuse wire was made of copper—and Chinese Pentolite, Wei-Liu knew, reacted adversely to copper, brass, magnesium, and steel. There were two wires buried three inches in the pale grayish-yellow explosive. By the time she exposed the end of the second one from the capacitor unit, she’d sweated clear through her shirt.
Rowdy had put her in the most secure position he could find. She and the bomb were concealed under a ten-foot-long outcropping of rock, some twenty yards below the top of the ridge. Slightly below her position, a ragged cluster of scruffy trees, bent almost forty-five degrees by the wind, helped shield her from view. Rowdy and the rest of them had used whatever they could find to obscure her work site. They’d brought boughs from below, as well as using the tarp from the truck to create a trompe l’oeil effect of light and shadow that masked Wei-Liu and the device.
It was time to remove the capacitors, to get them safely clear of the explosives. For that, she’d need an extra pair of hands or two. The capacitors themselves were banked in an insulated rectangular box that sat atop the MADM’s hull. The fifty-five-pound battery pack, which resembled the compressor compartment of a 1930s refrigerator, had been bolted directly behind the capacitors. The battery had been removed. But acid had leaked, fusing the six capacitor-unit bolts to the metal hull. Wei-Liu hadn’t been able to budge a single one.
The two Delta shooters ducked into Wei-Liu’s hideaway. She showed them the problem.
“Give us a couple of minutes,” Goose said. He rolled onto his back and pointed a small flashlight inside the MADM shell. “Got to see the nuts.” He squinted, then pulled himself onto his knees. “Twelve millimeter—maybe thirteen,” he said. “You have a socket set, ma’am?”
“I don’t,” Wei-Liu said. “I have a set of wrenches, though—here.”
The soldiers examined the tools. Curtis fit one of the wrenches to the top bolt and twisted it. “Too big—use the twelve.”
Goose picked through the pile, found the wrench, and worked his arm inside the MADM hull. After a few seconds he said, “Damn,” and pulled his arm out. He looked at WeiLiu. “It’s fused. Gonna have to muscle it off. You have any pliers?”
Wei-Liu retrieved a small pair from her tool satchel and displayed them. “Will these work?”
Goose’s face fell. “Needle nose,” he said. “Useless. I can’t get traction.”
Wei-Liu said, “What’s the problem?”
“The bolt head and nut are the same size,” Curtis said. “You have a single twelve-millimeter wrench. I need something to hold the bolt head tight while Goose takes the nut off.”
“Got it covered.” Goose pulled a dark multipurpose tool from a pouch on his belt. “Try this.”
He tossed the tool to Curtis, who flipped it open, revealing a set of snub-nosed pliers. “We’ll have these off in a couple of minutes, ma’am.”
Wei-Liu’s hand covered the bolt head. “Wait—”
Goose looked at her. “What’s the problem?”
“Those are steel,” Wei-Liu said. “You can’t use them—they might cause a spark.”
“Your call, ma’am.”
Wei-Liu plucked the multitool from the soldier’s hand and played with it for a few seconds. And then she extracted a saw-edged knife blade from one of the handles, locked it into place, and cut two small strips of cloth from her shirt-tail. She wrapped one strip around each of the pliers’ jaws. “Now,” she said. “Now.”
0900. “Fire in the hole.” From his position behind a boulder fifty yards upwind, X-Man shifted the safety bail on the firing device to its armed position, depressed the flat handle, and ducked. The six-pound charge of Semtex lifted the uphill side of the truck and flipped it, rolling the big vehicle onto its back in a huge orange fireball and cloud of toxic black smoke.
Kaz poked his head up to admire their handiwork. “Was it good for you, X?”
X-Man brushed debris out of his hair. “Oh, yeah. The earth really moved for me, Kazie-poo.” He waved at Yates, who gave the two spooks a smile, an upturned thumb, and then beckoned them up to his position.
“As soon as Bill and Tuzz finish siphoning off the avgas, get to work on the chopper. I want it burning when the Chinese show.”
Kaz grinned. “How come you give us all the good jobs?”
Rowdy shooed them away. “Go—play with matches. I have real work to do.”
He did, too. He had to position the IEDs where they’d do the most harm. He’d already scanned the area, trying to put himself inside the head of the Chinese commander. The PLA wouldn’t make the same mistake again. No—they’d try to drop their force above or behind. So Rowdy’d use them on his flanks. They might not stop the Chinese, but they’d slow them down.
He peered down at the overturned truck and the destroyed shell of the HIP. He knew he’d have to move the Chinese corpses again, scattering them to make it appear that they’d died overcoming the terrorists. It wasn’t something Rowdy was especially anxious to do. But it was essential if the ruse was to work. He scanned the horizon to the east, saw nothing, then glanced reflexively at the watch on his left wrist. Not nearly enough time, dammit. Not enough at all.
0906. Six detonator wires. Six detonator wires ran from the capacitors into the explosive. Wei-Liu was certain. She’d painstakingly isolated twelve from the unmarked bundles. But six of those had to be either duplicates, dummies, or re-dundants, because this MADM’s circuitry was engineered for a six-point detonation. She pulled the schematic out of her pocket, checked it for the fifth time in eleven minutes, and confirmed once again that the J-12 device was triggered by a six-point detonation.
But what if she was wrong?
SHE’D MANAGED to remove and then drain the capacitor block using an improvised ground to ensure there was no significant power left. Yes, the explosive was unstable. But she’d kept it from being unduly shocked or disturbed and, more important, protected from any sudden surge from the residual power in the capacitors. So, unless someone smacked it, dropped it, or put a bullet into it, the Pentolite wasn’t going to blow. And—as she’d explained so that Rowdy and the rest of them wouldn’t worry needlessly— once she’d disconnected the wires, even if it did blow up, the explosive wouldn’t trigger the MADM’s nuclear core, because the Pentolite wouldn’t be able to detonate in the precise sequence necessary to induce critical mass. There would simply be one hell of an explosion.
“How big?” the sergeant major asked.
“Big
enough,” she said, “to bring a decent-sized apartment house down.” That had obviously impressed him, because he’d moved everybody even farther away from the device than they had been.
SIX-POINT DETONATION. Wei-Liu looked at her handiwork and then glanced at the schematic one last time. Okay: all she had to do was cut twelve wires, and the bomb would be rendered safe. Snip-snip. End of story.
She sighed. After everything they’d been through, twelve wires seemed so, well, anticlimactic. But what if she was wrong …
Wrong? She? Not. Wei-Liu took the nonmagnetic needle-nose pliers, double-checked to make sure she had both knees on the antistatic mat, took one deep breath, exhaled, and then clipped the six red-taped wires one after the other.
Nothing. She took another deep breath and clipped the half-dozen green-flagged ones. She set the needle-nose pliers down on the antistatic mat but remained kneeling. Two immense and totally unexpected tears of relief rolled down her cheeks.
144 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.
0906 Hours Local Time.
“TOC—LONER.” Still nothing. Ritzik went forward. He tapped Mickey D’s shoulder. The pilot glanced around for an instant, then returned his attention to keeping the aircraft level. “Mick,” Ritzik shouted, “you have to take her up so I can pull a signal from Almaty.”
Mickey D didn’t acknowledge Ritzik. But his left hand adjusted the collective, his right played the cyclic control, and the chopper’s nose dipped about three degrees. Mick’s left hand shifted again on the collective and the aircraft began to rise as evenly as an elevator. At one thousand feet, Mick slowed the ascent and the HIP began a gentle sweep to the south. Ritzik pressed the transmit button. “TOC—Loner.”
“Loner—TOC.”
Thank God. “Dodger—sit-rep.” Ritzik listened, tapping coordinates into his handheld and getting them repeated so he knew they were on the money. The Chinese were coming out of Kashgar from the northwest—still only two of them: one HIP and a HIND gunship.
“No sign of the other HIND?”
“Negatory, Loner. It departed Kashgar, but we have no position for it.”
Ritzik didn’t like that at all. But there was nothing he could do about it. Meanwhile, the imagery showed the remaining two aircraft were making a wide swing over the desert. That made sense: they’d make their attack from the east so they’d be coming out of the sun. “Keep me posted.”
Ritzik made his way aft, carefully picking his way around Ty Weaver, who was dry-firing through the open hatch from a sitting position. “How’s it going?” he asked the sniper.
Weaver looked up. “?-Okay, boss.” He watched as the officer moved past him, then slipped back into his shooter’s frame of mind. This sit was A-Okay, all right. It was an AOkay FUBAR.
Weaver was faced with a sniper’s operational nightmare. All sniping is based on a few basic principles. Consistency is the most elemental of these, because consistency equals accuracy. Breathing, sight picture, spot weld, trigger pull, body position, platform stability, rifle, sight, and ammunition—the more these elements of shooting are kept consistent, the more accurate the sniper will become.
He adjusted the sling, then slipped into an open-legged sitting position. In most circumstances, Ty preferred not to use the sling. But there were times—like this one—when he needed every bit of help he could get. He extended his left leg slightly to provide himself a little more stability as the chopper bounced, pressed his cheek against the stock, swung the big rifle right/left, then left/right, found himself an imaginary target, and eased his finger onto the trigger. As he did, the HIP hit an air pocket and he lost his spot weld. The shot would have gone wild. Solution: Concentrate, schmuck. And hold the damn rifle more securely.
The rifle, ammo, and scope were no problem. Ty could play this particular 7.62 instrument like a bloody Stradivarius. He’d put thousands of rounds through the MSG90. He knew how it would perform with a cold barrel, and where the rounds would go after two, three, four, five, even ten shots. He’d tuned his own body to the rifle’s unique vibrations, and so was able to read and understand even the most minute variation in the tuning-fork sprong that coursed through the gun and through him every time he pulled the crisp, beautifully unfluctuating three-pound trigger. Those things wouldn’t change.
But Ty knew he could forget about platform consistency. The platform was the chopper deck, which was not only vibrating from the engines and rotor blades, but moving left, right, up, and down. Not to mention the ear-shattering noise. Body position? He could shoot offhand—standing up—but only if the chopper remained in a steady hover. Not bloody likely in combat. Shooting from a prone position was out of the question, because the field of fire from the chopper would be way too narrow. That meant he’d be reduced to using a kneeling or a sitting position. Sitting also restricted his field of fire to some degree. But it was a lot more stable than kneeling—especially given the chopper’s constant bumpy motion.
Sight picture was another important element of consistency. But it, too, was going to be problematic. Back at the CAG, Ty had worked for hours to maintain the consistency of his sight picture. His spot weld—the placement of his cheek against the rifle’s stock—was exactly the same whenever he pulled the trigger. That uniformity produced the exact same eye relief—the distance from his eye to the scope’s rear lens—every single time he put the rifle to his shoulder. Consistent eye relief, in turn, resulted in an identical sight picture through the scope. Today, the HIP’s motion would make maintaining consistent spot weld and sight picture problematic. Not impossible: Ty had worked to develop sniping proficiency from virtually any kind of platform, including choppers. But the HIP added hugely to the degree of difficulty he’d be attempting.
Follow-through was also going to be a predicament. In normal circumstances—like the ambush at Yarkant Köl—Ty had been able to maintain the consistency of his shooting through the stability of his follow-through, which meant that between the time he fired the shot and the bullet actually left the gun there was no movement of the barrel. Stability ensured that the sight picture never changed, not even by a hairbreadth, in the roughly quarter of a second between the trigger pull, the sear release, the firing pin striking the primer, and the bullet traveling down the MSG90’s 23.62-inch barrel and emerging from the harmonic stabilizer or the sound suppressor. Proper follow-through was going to be difficult when, even though the rifle might not move, the platform was guaranteed to shift between trigger pull and bullet departure.
Then there was angle compensation. It is easiest to shoot straight across a flat space—shooting on a target range, for example. The flatter the angle, the less the shooter has to compensate for uphill or downhill trajectory, which has to be figured differently from bullet drop, crosswind, or temperature and humidity fluctuations.
At an uphill angle of forty-five degrees, for example, you can put your crosshairs dead center on the target, pull the trigger—and your shot will miss its mark, going high by about eight inches. The difficulty of shooting from the chopper would be compounded because Ty knew he’d be snap-shooting at extreme angles of thirty, forty, even sixty degrees as Mickey D maneuvered the HIP under battle conditions. It would be kind of like trying to shoot ten out of ten bull’s-eyes while riding a roller coaster. No—it would be like trying to shoot from one moving roller-coaster car to a target sitting in a second moving roller-coaster car. All things considered, Ty thought, the situation was nasty enough to make a man take up the “spray and pray” shooting technique, or think about forgetting everything he’d ever learned, and reverting to “Kentucky” windage.
0912. Ty sensed Ritzik moving past him. He was shouting, but the sniper paid the major no mind. He was completely focused on his own situation, working Zen-like to exclude every bit of extraneous stimuli, until only he and the rifle remained. If he could accomplish that much, he’d be able to overcome the physical obstacles and do what he had to.
Suddenly the chopper hiccuped, knocking him out
of position. The HIP dropped like a stone, recovered, twisted into the sun at a forty-degree angle, fighting its way into the sky. The sniper was slapped to the deck and rolled aft. He fought to maintain what was left of his balance, cradling the big rifle to keep it from smashing into a bulkhead or seat. Oh, this was not going to be any fun at all.
26
144 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.
0912 Hours Local Time.
“LONER, TOC. Your bogeys are coming in from the east. Distance is twenty-two miles and closing.”
“Roger that, TOC.” Ritzik hand-signaled Gene Shepard to hang on. He worked his way forward to the cockpit, stepping around the sniper, who was focused, trancelike, on a spot somewhere outside the aircraft.
“Mick,” Ritzik shouted, “let’s do it.”
“Hoo-ah, boss.”
Ritzik’s fingers whitened around the cockpit support struts as the HIP dropped. “Mick?”
“Yo?”
Ritzik’s knees flexed as if he were shooting a mogul course as the craft twisted violently, recovered, shot upward, and finally veered to its left, turning into the sun. “Get us in position for Ty to take the other pilots out before they discover we’re not friendly.”
“Roger that. What side is he shooting from?”
“Port side. Port side.” Ritzik squinted through the windshield as the chopper regained even flight. Then he turned and staggered aft, holding on to whatever he could find for support.
Sam Phillips’s stomach queased as the HIP abruptly lost altitude. He fought the nausea, finally regaining his equilibrium as Mick brought the craft around. Instinctively, he reached up and snugged the shoulder straps that held him against the seat back. Sam had never much liked flying, and choppers made him a lot more nervous than planes. They were, he thought, complicated, hard-to-fly aircraft that required total concentration on the part of their pilots. Indeed, as he’d watched Mickey D familiarize himself with the HIP’s responses, he’d been amazed that the pilot could keep the big bird in the air at all, single-handedly. And when Mick hovered the HIP the first time, Sam swore he could smell the tension rolling off the pilot’s body and permeating the cockpit.