“Mr. Marcinko, I would very much like to be with you when you do that.”
“Absolutely, Mr. Prime Minister. Would you like to stop back at your house and pick up the rest of your security detail?”
“I feel much better with you men, thank you just the same.”
* * *
The prime minister put on a safety belt at our insistence. I had him come over to the door and watch as we pulled over the school. The first policemen were just responding to the front; two men got out of the car.
“If the building had been taken over by terrorists, those guys would be dead right now,” I told the prime minister. “They’re acting way too nonchalant.”
“A big deficiency,” he said, shaking his head.
We saw many other big deficiencies over the next few minutes as the response built. The prime minister’s head nodded up and down so much as I pointed them out that I started to think he was a bobblehead doll.
I have to admit I was feeling pretty damn good right about then. We’d just pulled off a highly successful op — there is no better way to start a morning. I had the ear of the country’s most important leader, and was giving him a firsthand lecture on what needed to be done to toughen up his country’s war against terror. This wasn’t a home run; this was a grand slam.
But, to mix my metaphors in a way that will surely drive my copy editor back to the bottle, into every bright day must come a dark cloud.
And sometimes a little fire and smoke as well.
“Interesting and dramatic,” said the minister, pointing out the door of the helo. “Is that explosion part of your exercise as well?”
Explosion? What explosion?
I looked over his shoulder just in time to see a very small puff of smoke erupt from a building across from the athletic fields.
The small puff was followed by a much larger flash of red, which in turn was followed by an angry furl of black, which gave way to an exceedingly orange sheet of fire.
I’ve run out of adjectives to torture, but you get the idea. The building beyond the fence of the athletic center was in the process of blowing up. Fireballs shot straight up from the north end, while black bits of building and other debris spat from the south with a force Old Faithful would have been proud of.
I took out my sat phone to call Doc and find out what the hell was going on. He had the same idea, and I went straight to voice mail. I clicked off; before I could redial, Trace was on the line.
“What the hell is going on?” she demanded.
“I’m trying to figure that out myself. Get out to the field.”
“I’m out there. Dick — Helos!”
I looked down in time to see two large pieces of shrapnel being ejected from the turmoil. As I stared, the jagged pieces of rubbish grew into the shape of two small helicopters.
“Land the chopper!” I yelled over the helo’s interphone circuit. “We need to let the prime minister out.”
“Then what?” asked the pilot.
“Then we have to follow those helicopters. They’re being stolen.”
* * *
Yes, I did jump to conclusions. Yes, I was right. No, don’t be impressed. It’s not hard to put two and two together when you see red flashes of gunfire directed at the corner of the property where there’s a security post.
Had I realized the helicopter factory was a target a few days before — now that would have been impressive.
* * *
Our pilot dropped the Mi-8TV down on the practice field directly behind the dorm. I helped the prime minster out as the team security people ran over, then nearly fell over as a hurricane whipped nearby.
Hurricane Trace Dahlgren, to be exact.
I scrambled back into the aircraft.
“Go!” she was yelling. “Get this piece of shit off the ground! Follow them.”
The pilot had already started to do just that. He lifted the craft up at the end of the field over the goals, then banked sharply to follow the track of the two helicopters. They were flying to the northeast.
Roughly in the direction of Pakistan. China’s over there as well.
A cacophony of confusion filled the radio airwave. Our pilot alerted the Indian air force, but of course they didn’t have a fighter patrol nearby. Interceptors were scrambled to the north and west; in the meantime, they “hoped” we could keep the choppers in sight.
Our captain was certainly trying. He had the throttles at max, and even strained forward against his restraints as if that might give his bird some extra momentum.
The purloined helicopters had a reasonably good lead, but they didn’t seem to realize that we were chasing them. Within two or three minutes we spotted them ahead, two little black dots at the right side of the forward windscreen.
“Faster!” urged Trace. She’s become a fairly good helicopter pilot over the past year or so, and I could tell that she was itching to take the controls.
The little dots started to grow. As we closed to roughly three miles, the copilot called the Indian air command on the radio, giving the approximate location and heading.
He’d no sooner clicked off his mike when the other helos began pulling ahead. They were monitoring the frequencies.
Which gave me an idea.
“Tell the air force you have them in your sights and you’re ready to shoot them down if they don’t land,” I told the copilot.
“But, Commander Rick, they are out of the range. And even so, we do not have the missiles with us today.”
“We don’t have to tell them any of that,” I explained. “They’re going to get away if we don’t do something. This way we might be able to get them to surrender.”
“A bluff?”
“That’s right.”
The copilot made the call — several times. Each time, the transmission was overrun by a number of other pilots on the circuit, all talking over each other.
“Shit,” muttered Trace. “They’ll never hear it.”
I looked up and saw one of the helicopters peeling to the left.
“Which one do we follow?” asked the pilot.
“Whichever is closer,” I said.
“They’re not splitting up,” said Trace. “They’re attacking.”
She was right. Whoever was in the helos had heard the transmission and was in no mood to surrender.
The chopper on the left banked into a one-eighty. Something flashed from its chin.
A thirty-millimeter shell, which sailed far to our left.
The next twenty or so were considerably closer, all coming within two or three feet of us.
Except for one that grazed the right underside of the helicopter.
You’d think that a shell running along the bottom of a helicopter doesn’t really amount to much. A light flesh wound, barely more than a paper cut.
But when you’re traveling at 150 knots in a sardine tin, even a paper cut hurts like hell. The helo bucked, pitching hard on its axis. The tail jerked to the right while the nose tried to push itself higher, probably to avoid the acrid smell of burning paint and metal.
Our pilot held us in the air. Even better, he kept the helicopter from tearing itself apart, and began a sharp bank away from our approaching enemy.
The stolen helicopter whipped past. It looked like an artist’s dream of an Apache attack helicopter, a sleek collection of triangles topped by a tornado, with stubby wedge wings and double cannons mounted beneath the hull.
Nasty.
Something started popping behind me. I turned back toward the crew cabin and saw Trace at the side gun mount, blasting away at the gunship as it passed.
“Those are blanks!” I yelled. “We’re not carrying live ammo because of the exercise!”
She gave me a look that said, you dumb shit.
Not that I disagreed at that moment.
The stolen attack helicopter spun around behind us. The pilot shouted a warning as he began pirouetting through the sky, ducking left and right and firing flares to dec
oy our adversary. Shells burst all around us; the side of the helicopter took some light shrapnel, but the maneuvers were enough to keep the big blows away.
We were lucky — had the attack bird been carrying heat-seeking missiles, things would have been different. But at that moment, we weren’t exactly counting our blessings.
The Mi-8TV suddenly yawed hard on its keel. Trace fell against me as we both tumbled toward the other side of the hull. I looked up and saw the attack chopper passing within two or three meters.
Trace pushed down, coiling her body for a leap across space. I grabbed her just in time.
“Easy, Geronimo,” I said, collaring her. “Don’t do something stupid. You can’t fly and this isn’t worth dying for.”
She probably cursed, but if so, I couldn’t hear it over the rush of wind. Our helicopter jerked hard to the left, sending us back across the cabin. It bucked a few times, and we lurched against the bulkhead.
“Prepare for a landing,” said the pilot. “Emergency landing.”
I realized I heard him clearly, though his voice was rather soft.
The engines had stopped. We’d run out of fuel.
Victory smiles upon those who anticipate the changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after they occur.
— GENERAL GIULIO DOUHET, THE COMMAND OF THE AIR, 1921
4
( I )
I remember reading an article somewhere that claimed that helicopters are a hell of a lot safer than airplanes, because if they have engine problems or run out of fuel, they’re easy to land. The author made it sound as if they just flutter on down to the ground like a butterfly, settling without a care in the world.
He must have been referring to some other helicopter.
The Mi-8TV did have good forward momentum, but the pilot was basically guiding a brick to an abrupt stop. He got the helicopter into what is called autorotation: basically, he traded momentum and altitude for enough wind energy to spin the rotors, which acted like a giant wing.
More like a wing with holes. We came down in a rush, not quite a belly flop but not a gentle glide either. My ears popped and my stomach tried to float upward.
“You will brace for impact!” the pilot yelled.
We braced away. The ground kept coming.
We’d flown about seventy miles from Delhi, to an area north of Dhanaura filled with small farm fields and trees. Lots of trees. Which was all Trace or I could see out of the side as we came in.
We scraped the top of one of the trees, then flopped hard onto the ground, pitching forward then rearing back, all in seemingly the same motion.
There was a moment of silence, as if the chopper were paying tribute to its pilot.
“Well that sucks,” said Trace, letting go of the spar she’d grabbed. “They got away.”
Some people just never know to look on the bright side of life.
The two crewmen in the back began securing the helicopter. I went forward and checked on the pilot and copilot, who were calmly going through a post-flight checklist.
“Dick!” shouted Trace from outside. “Dick!”
I went to see what all the shouting was, stepping out of the side hatchway.
Into muck up to my waist.
“Be careful!” yelled Trace. “We landed in a mud hole!”
* * *
She was still laughing when we got back to the capital a few hours later. She was probably the only person in Delhi who was, though. The government was in an uproar, and of course the Indian media was having a field day, talking about the daring daylight attack on the Indian defense industry.
The two helicopters had gotten away clean. Because of their design, they had no trouble eluding air control radar, and by the time the Indian air force was able to get its fancy new Su-35s into the area, they were nowhere to be found. You can imagine how overjoyed the government and military were about this.
Pakistan was suspected of having stolen the aircraft. This was a rather logical assumption, and not just because relations between the two countries were permanently strained. Clearly, the operation had been carefully planned, and it seemed obvious that only a highly motivated foe could have pulled it off.
China was also a suspect. Not exactly an Indian ally, the Chinese have been extremely active in the realm of industrial espionage as well as military spying, and this caper combined both. On the other hand, the Chinese lately have been generally trying to buy what they want. They have plenty of U.S. Savings Bonds, after all, to do just that.
The argument against China as a suspect went like this: if they were really after an attack helicopter, China could have worked out a deal with Eurocopter for one of their Eurocopter Tigers, or with the Russians for whatever version of the Mi-28 they were willing to part with. Both helicopters are basically Apache knockoffs, with a few little spiffs here and there. India had actually taken the same approach, surveying prototypes from Eurocopter and others while working up their domestic solution.
The stolen helicopters were the first two examples of that solution. Known as the Ahi, the model was said in the media to be the equivalent of the American Comanche, the so-called stealth helicopter developed by Boeing Sikorsky but canceled during the Bush administration because of costs elsewhere.
The Comanche was designed as a scout — fast, less detectable on radar than normal helicopters, it would have been only lightly armed. The Indian Ahi, however, was conceived of more as an attack bird than a scout, able to pound as well as sneak.
Whatever. The bottom line was, someone had stolen two of India’s real military prizes, and there was hell to pay.
The fact that India had been conducting training exercises to test its response to terrorism at the time of the attack just added to the general uproar.
I don’t know that the prime minister actually blamed us for the military’s failure to prevent the theft, but he really didn’t have to. Opposition parties were screaming and making all sorts of wild accusations, and with so much excrement in the air, it was inevitable that some would fall on Special Squadron Zero. Though still officially secret, its existence was now a matter of open speculation.
Minister Dharma spent most of the day in damage control mode, making phone calls and attempting to charm fellow cabinet members. Captain Birla, who should have been celebrating a decent operation, was even glummer than he had been after the prisoners had escaped.
It had been a hell of a week. Seven days before, he’d been at the pinnacle of success, the founding commander of one of the country’s elite counterterror squads. Now he was on the verge of becoming the punch line of every joke about intelligence and covert agencies.
“There’s only one thing for you to do today,” I told him when I saw his long face hanging over his desk at headquarters. “You have to go see the good Doctor.”
“The Bombay cure?”
“Known to fix nearly every ailment plaguing man,” I said. “And a few that bother women as well.”
He nodded. I rounded up Sergeant Phurem and a few of the captain’s other trusted noncoms and sent them out for gin therapy.
I would have joined them, but Omar, the friendly Christian in Action station chief, phoned and requested a personal briefing from yours truly on the helicopter fiasco. He was pretty nasty about it, but since I was wondering what was going on myself, I agreed to meet him at the embassy. He invited the deputy chief of mission12 — the number two guy at the embassy — along with two other spooks. We all went into the secure area for a little confab.
It was your typical CIA conversation, a cross between an inquisition and a pep rally, where I was supposed to genuflect and kiss their rings in the name of patriotism.
Omar thought I had arranged the entire caper as a cover to steal the helicopters.
Why?
“Let’s face it, Dick,” he told me, leaning across the table that sat at the center of the bug-proof room. “You’re not getting any younger. You don’t have much in the way o
f savings. You pull off something like this, you can retire in style.”
“Much as I like the idea of commuting to work in an attack helicopter,” I replied, “I don’t quite see how it would be a real money-making proposition.”
“Come on,” said Omar. “You sell it to the Chinks, the Ruskies — that’s quite a payday.”
“I’m not exactly a great friend of the Chinese premier. I embarrassed one of his protégés not too long ago.”
“Boeing would be willing to pay,” said one of Omar’s sidekicks. “And you wouldn’t be betraying your country.”
Looking back, I realize that maybe that was an offer, very cleverly worded. If so, it went over my head at the time. I glanced at the deputy chief of mission, who looked like he wanted to be somewhere else, like maybe strapped to a log in a sawmill.
“You don’t really think I had anything to do with this, do you?” I asked. “If we were going to steal something like this, I sure wouldn’t have hung around Delhi to be called over the hill by some shit-for-brains pencil-dicked spymaster.”
I know, I know — calling Omar a spymaster damned a long line of honest, hardworking spies.
“We’re not questioning your patriotism,” he said. “We just want to know what happened.”
“So do I.”
* * *
I know an exit line when I utter one, and I left without further ado. Or adieu.
I made it back to the Maharaja Express for an afternoon briefing and skull session. Everyone was there — Doc, Trace, Shotgun, Mongoose, and Junior. They’d spent the last few hours monitoring the various news reports on the helicopter theft.
There was one bright spot: Trace’s exploits had been noticed by the bookmaking community, which had moved the Scottish field hockey squad from long shot to odds-on favorite.
Other than that, not so good.
If you like conspiracy theories — and who doesn’t — linking the escape of the prisoners, the theft of the helicopters, and the nuclear warhead negotiations was child’s play. All of us in the room could supply any number of theories, twisted and otherwise, to show that they were linked. But there was no evidence that they were. On the contrary, everything suggested they weren’t — if, for example, terrorists had stolen the helicopters to attack the nuclear storehouse, wouldn’t they have just gone straight there? Why fly in the opposite direction?
RW16 - Domino Theory Page 13