Scorpion Strike

by Nance, John J. ;

  The helicopter was a steady, sitting-duck target in the Iraqi pilot’s gunsight, the shot almost too good to be true. His own fire-control radar was showing he had been locked up now by several incoming American fighters who had missile guidance heads tracking his tailpipe. There had been no missile launch yet, but there would be, and the Iraqi knew he had precious little time.

  There was a wild card, though. As long as the helicopter he was stalking remained airborne, the U.S. fighters would probably do a flyby before starting an attack. Perhaps that would give him time for one final pass if he didn’t get the Hind on this one.

  The pilot steadied the MiG and began using his rudder to walk the cross hairs of his gunsight into position, his finger caressing the trigger as he waited to get slightly closer.

  There was a powerful Gatling gun on that Hind, he knew, but obviously whoever was flying the helicopter didn’t know how to use it.

  Still another radar lock-on showed up on his screen.

  He had decided on a plan. Since there would be no time to run, he would shoot down the helicopter as ordered and then immediately punch out.

  His jet would never fly again anyway. There was no way the Americans were going to give him enough time to reach a runway anywhere.

  The pilot turned his attention back to the helicopter in his cross hairs.

  It wasn’t there!

  Doug brought in the collective once more to arrest the wild vertical descent. He had intended to stop in another hover, but the machine balked. Suddenly they were flying backwards, and then to the side, and then forward as he began fighting the gyrating machine, almost losing it. The fighter was still aiming at the spot five hundred feet overhead that the helicopter had occupied seconds before, but at a range of two miles he saw the MiG pilot figure it out as he nosed over and began walking his tracers across the Hind. The sound of a bullet ricocheting off one of the rotor blades was followed by four noises in the cargo compartment that sounded like BBs transiting a tin can.

  The MiG pulled up suddenly, his firing solution too dangerous. He would have to dive toward the ground to keep shooting.

  Doug fought to move in a straight line again as he swiveled to the left, catching sight of something on the ground.

  “Will, there’s a base over there!”

  No answer, but Will’s head was steady now and not moving. It looked like he was hunched over something.

  Doug tried to peer to the left even as he started swinging the bucking chopper back to the right. Was he imagining things, or was that Old Glory on top of a tent?

  Maybe, he thought. Just maybe!

  He had the chopper in a right turn again, looking for the MiG, which, ominously, was nowhere in sight.

  Doug pivoted more to the north and kept coming around, searching the sky for the smoke trail. The sun was almost on the horizon now, and if it came up before the fighter made his next pass, he would try to position himself between the sun and the fighter.

  Doug glanced back in the cargo compartment. Shakir was holding on to his wife, who was holding on to their children. The remaining soldier was hanging on too, apparently uninterested in doing anything but surviving.

  He checked the instrument panel as best he could, considering the Arabic labels. There were no red lights blinking and nothing to indicate they had taken any serious hits from the bullets he had heard.

  Where the hell is he?

  Doug had almost let himself hope that the MiG had been chased off when a slight smudge of smoke at ten o’clock high caught his sight.

  Oh Jeez! The sumbitch is diving!

  This was the last pass, the Iraqi pilot told himself. This time he wasn’t about to let a damned helicopter weasel out of his gun-sights. As long as he maintained a steep vertical intercept angle, the helicopter down there could gyrate all over the place and still not spoil the shot.

  He heard the airspeed increasing as he centered the cross hairs and prepared to readjust to whatever the target tried to do. He would get the shot, pull up, head north, and eject—probably just as someone back there launched a missile down his tailpipe. It was all or nothing now, and all his concentration and training and survival instincts focused on making these last shots count.

  The first tracers snaked by on the right as Doug pushed over and accelerated as fast as possible in the direction from which the MiG was diving. He yanked the cyclic back and forth, banking wildly and hoping the rotor blades could take it, while the deadly stream of bullets and tracers followed him, as if a determined little boy with a hose were trying to soak his target.

  Will had still not moved and Doug was becoming alarmed. Those hits had been in the back, hadn’t they? Had Will been hit?

  Again he jerked the chopper to the right, hearing another sickening sound of penetrated metal behind him as several bullets found their mark through the body of the Hind, one of the hits sounding like shrapnel.

  The MiG was still two miles or so distant. He stopped firing suddenly at the same moment Will’s voice rang out from the bubble ahead. Doug was so glad to hear him, he almost ignored the words.

  “Pitch up! I’ve got it! Pitch up now!”

  The MiG was firing again, the deadly trail of tracers starting low in front of them and coming forward as the pilot corrected his aim.

  And without warning a strange sound and vibration shuddered through the helicopter. Doug thought one of the engines or the tail rotor had been hit.

  The cyclic stick was vibrating badly, the vibrations shaking his spine.

  What the hell is causing that?

  Suddenly Doug realized it was they who were firing and fighting back. The vibrations were coming from the minigun.

  The first tracers that snaked past the cockpit of the MiG had been dismissed by the pilot as his own. Then he realized that he was also being fired on. Someone in the helicopter had discovered the minigun.

  He had only seconds left in his attack dive, but the chopper was still in the air and unhurt. He could break off now and punch out, or give it five more seconds and one more burst.

  The thought processes took less than two seconds to rocket around his brain, but the prospect of having to punch out without completing his mission was unacceptable.

  One more shot.

  The helicopter was firing wide as the MiG pilot popped his stick downward and dropped away from the oncoming stream of tracers, steadying out again as the cross hairs centered nicely on the Hind. His brain began the process of triggering the motor response to his index finger to pull the trigger—but the message never arrived.

  The lethal stream of flying lead that Will had been firing wide of the mark suddenly found its target, obliterating the canopy, the cockpit, and its occupant before chewing up the engine and igniting the ammunition and fuel tanks in a single explosive event.

  “You got him! You got him!” Doug yelled at Will.

  What had been a MiG-21 one moment was now a fireball of falling debris to be avoided.

  Doug threw the Hind into a left bank as Will realized he no longer had a target. He let up on the trigger, amazed at the result.

  Will turned in the nose gunner’s canopy and looked back at Doug with an unusually broad grin, his right thumb held against the top of the Plexiglas in a victory salute.

  In the cockpit of the lead F-15, the locked-up target had suddenly flared and disappeared, leaving only the slow-mover that AWACS had ID’d as a helicopter.

  “Good shooting, Ranger one-zero-one,” the voice of the AWACS controller sounded in his headset, and he pressed his transmit button in reply.

  “Ranger one-zero-one never took the shot. I don’t know who got him.”

  Will made his way back to the cockpit and appeared at Doug’s elbow, a grin still on his face—until he glanced to the north.

  “Oh God, more fighters!”

  Doug jerked his head around and spotted the smoke trails—and the twin tails.

  “Those are our Eagles,” Doug said, “and here we are in an enemy chopper. G
ot anything white to wave like maybe your life depended on it?”

  To his surprise, Will nodded. “I already borrowed this from Mrs. Abbas. She pulled it out of her bag for me.”

  He held up a white nylon slip and raised his eyebrows.

  Doug laughed, then began urging the helicopter toward the camp he had spotted earlier, having just as much trouble staying steady at low speed as before.

  “I’m going to keep us slow in case anyone down there is nervously fingering a trigger.”

  “You can’t fly this thing slow,” Will told him. “I saw you try to hover before, remember? It was a disaster.”

  “Hey, it’s just a steep learning curve, okay?” Doug tried to look offended, then his expression became serious again. “You better start waving that thing.”

  Three miles distant, the lead F-15 pilot calculated the remaining distance between the helicopter and the U.S. base and decided his shot was too dangerous. He had been locked on the target for several minutes, his missile giving him a steady tone as the radar and the missile guidance package tracked the Hind and waited for the order to drop off the rail and fly.

  But the wreckage might fall in the camp, and there was still the chance this was a defector who just hadn’t heard all the radio energy directing him not to overfly the camp.

  The F-15 driver broke right and began a circle, advising his wingman to slow up and fly by for a closer look.

  Will slid open a small window and waved Saliah’s white slip as the F-15 passed.

  “We’ve got a defector here with a white flag,” was the message radioed to Crown and his lead. There was no way to see more detail inside the helicopter, but with the fighter attack, it made sense.

  Nearly two hundred U.S. servicemen and -women were gathered now along the north edge of the camp. The rumor that they were watching a defector trying to reach safety had rippled through the throng, and everyone had cheered when the Hind fired and the MiG-21 disintegrated in a fireball.

  Now a pair of incoming F-15s had broken off without attacking, which seemed to confirm the rumor.

  The Hind was approaching the camp as if the pilot were determined to put on a flying comedy show. As they watched, the Hind did a sudden pop-up climb, turned to face the camp, promptly sideslipped off to one side, turned to the west and backed up, then pitched forward and turned completely around to the right before starting for the camp again, the machine yawing back toward the east as it continued sideways toward the boundary line.

  Up and down, rocking, gyrating, and yawing, the craft was more or less trending in their direction.

  When the helicopter was within a tenth of a mile, it swung around to the west again and the entire camp saw for the first time the white slip fluttering along the left side.

  Another cheer went up.

  The wild gyrations had been almost comical, but now they were becoming alarming.

  “Doug, can’t you stabilize this tub?” Will asked, concern showing on his face.

  “I’m working on it.” Doug saw the camp off to his left. He wanted to put the camp directly on the nose, but the Hind was exerting a will of its own. It either wanted to slip left or right.

  “I can’t make this damn thing go forward!” Doug cried.

  “Well, just put it down somewhere in the open,” Will yelled back over his shoulder as he struggled to hold on to the white slip, which was threatening to tear loose from his grip.

  They could see the crowd gathering below as the Hind gyrated back and forth.

  Doug gestured with a slight tilt of his head. “There’s a clear area way over in the middle of the camp. I’m gonna put her down there.”

  “That’s too crowded,” Will shot back, but he could tell Doug was determined. “We’ll hit something!”

  “No, we won’t. Trust me!”

  The cyclic was almost behaving now as Doug worked to get the right combination of power and pitch to keep moving. He kept telling himself to just “think” the controls in the appropriate direction, but his movements were still too abrupt.

  “Doug, they’re going to want you to take a Breathalyzer test when we get down there. We’re all over the sky!”

  They were over the edge of the crowd now and bobbling between fifty and eighty feet above the ground as Doug once again felt himself sideslipping. He brought in a bit more collective and nudged the cyclic back to the right, causing the inevitable overreaction, and remembered at last a long-ago snippet of advice from an instructor who had almost despaired of teaching Lieutenant Doug Harris to fly formation.

  “Keep the stick moving,” the instructor had advised. “Average your corrections.”

  Doug began stirring the cyclic, causing a seasick motion that nevertheless gave him more control.

  Will held on to the pilot’s seat and glanced back, noting the pallor of Shakir Abbas’s face as he and Saliah held on to each other and their frightened children.

  From the ground it looked like some sort of aerial victory dance, and within seconds someone in the crowd punched on a boom box, which began pumping a driving rhythm that almost matched the movements of the Hind as it came directly over their heads now, wobbling like a top.

  “By George, I think I’ve got it!”

  Doug could feel the machine obey him at last. He was still wobbling, but it was a controlled wobble, and he pushed it toward the small clearing in the tent city beside several larger tents a few hundred yards inside the compound from where the crowd had formed.

  “I don’t know, Doug.”

  Doug moved toward what had to be a shower tent before inching the collective down as he kept stirring the cyclic, urging the Hind toward the targeted landing zone.

  Fifty, forty, thirty, and finally twenty feet, Doug let the ship settle as he turned his head for a final comment to Will.

  “Hey! I think I’m finally getting the hang of this!”

  Unconsciously, his hand moved the stick ever so slightly at the same moment, and the Hind sidestepped in response.

  Suddenly they were ballooning more than twenty feet above the ground as the left main landing gear snagged the tie-down ropes of the men’s shower tent, the Velcro seams holding the interior structure of rubberized canvas shower stalls and plastic hose plumbing intact as the helicopter neatly lifted the entire assembly clear of the dirt floor before tossing it to one side in the hurricane force of the wind from the rotor blades.

  Doug urged the machine back to his right, and with a clear area beneath them again, unloaded the collective and let the Hind settle to the ground, fighting to throttle down the engines and stop the rotor blades—which had picked up a loose section of the tent fabric, the KA-WHUMP, KA-WHUMP, KA-WHUMP of the gyrating canvas making a horrendous noise until the blades finally flung it clear, sailing it off into the distance.

  “Was anybody in there?” Doug asked, alarmed, as he strained to see the site of the missing tent. He toggled off the master switch.

  Will nodded. “You might say that.”

  Three customers had been taking showers when the incongruous sounds of an approaching helicopter finally grew louder than the noise from the shower heads. There had been no time to react, and now the three officers—a brigadier general and two captains—were standing unhurt but completely in the open next to a large Russian helicopter with Iraqi markings, holding their bars of soap and wearing nothing more than startled expressions as a cheering crowd approached and the collapsed rubber-hose plumbing continued spraying hot water at their feet.

  It was all very confusing.

  The two captains retreated to the side of the denuded tent platform to find their clothes, but the general stood his ground, studying the cockpit windows, realizing from a face looking back at him that at least one American GI was involved in the strange arrival of the enemy craft.

  He saw the flight suit then, and the flash of a set of colonel’s eagles on the shoulder.

  The crowd surged forward and surrounded the helicopter. The Hind had settled between the shower te
nt and the audience, but now they could see the general and they began applauding and hooting, blocking the military policemen who were rushing to the scene.

  The one-star waved to the crowd au naturel, took a bow, and walked slowly over to retrieve his towel. He wrapped the towel around his waist, found his hat and an unlit cigar, put on the hat, stuffed the cigar in his mouth, and strode around the front of the helicopter.

  Doug saw the general, who was obviously uninjured except for his dignity, and slid back the window, a grin of immense relief at having landed safely still covering his face.

  “We’re American GIs! Air Force!” Doug yelled.

  The crowd surged even closer as the general took the cigar from his lips, cleared his throat, and looked up.

  “First,” he said, “I’d like to take a peek at your pilot’s license.”

  Will was the first out of the Hind, followed closely by Doug, both of them smiling broadly, intent on identifying themselves as they shook hands all around. They had seen Shakir and his wife huddled together in the corner of the helicopter’s interior as they left—the remaining Iraqi soldier still shackled to the floor—but they hadn’t noticed the anguish in the eyes of Saliah Abbas.

  The crowd pressed around them, diverting their attention, but a small voice from within the helicopter caused both Will and Doug to turn around.

  “Please … help, please!” The accented plea came from Saliah Abbas, who was still sitting on the sidewall seat, holding her husband’s shoulders and staring in horror at a growing patch of crimson on the front of his shirt, his head lolled against her shoulder.

  Will was in the helicopter in an instant with Doug close behind as they opened his shirt and saw the entry wound.

  “Help … please!” she was saying again in the only English she knew, and several GIs jumped in to comfort her and the children as Doug yelled for a medic and Will helped Shakir lie down on the bench seat.

  Will looked up at the bullet holes in the interior, unaware until now that they had taken so many hits. Most were clean entry and exit trajectories that blessedly had bypassed the Abbas family and the soldier by many feet. But one had apparently come out as jagged shrapnel. One of those pieces of shrapnel had apparently entered Shakir’s chest.