Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

Rooney walked over to Smitz, huddled just inside the door of the aircraft barn.

“You got to get yourself some foul-weather gear, Smitty,” he told him. “Things can get mighty strange out here in the straits.”

“You’re telling me,” Smitz replied.

No sooner were the words out of his mouth when his cell phone rang. It was the tower. Four planes were on their way in.

“I suppose they didn’t tell you exactly what we’re getting,” Rooney asked as he tried to relight his cigar in the pouring rain.

Smitz resisted the temptation to ask him for a puff.

“They weren’t specific,” Smitz replied. “But I’ve got a pretty good guess.”

“Yeah,” Rooney said. “Me too.”

Their words were drowned out by the sound of the first airplane approaching. The high-pitched whine meant only one thing. This was a huge C-5 Galaxy cargo jet coming in.

The monstrous plane appeared out of the mist a moment later. It slammed down with a great screech of tires and smoke, and roared by them with oceans of spray flying in every direction.

“Damn!” Smitz exclaimed.

“Not the kind of plane you’d expect to land in a hurricane,” Rooney said.

Right on its tail came a second Galaxy. Behind it, a third, then a fourth. The four airplanes touched down as if they’d been choreographed. By the time the last plane had landed, the first C-5 had reached the end of the long runway and had taxied back around towards the hangar. It pulled to a stop in front of Smitz and Rooney, its nose opening like a gigantic set of jaws.

The insides were packed so tightly, it was hard to see exactly what the flying beast was carrying. But the aircrew hopped to it, and soon two dark canvas-covered forms were being pushed out of the gaping maw and into the hangar.

“Damn, look at that,” Rooney said, somehow puffing his water-soaked cigar. “It’s like a whale giving birth through its mouth!”

“But what the hell are these things?” Smitz asked.

Rooney finally threw the cigar away and lit up another.

“Let’s find out,” he said.

As soon as the first bundle was inside the hangar, Smitz had a word with the first C-5’s loadmaster. Smitz signed a slew of documents, and then asked that the C-5’s crew remove the canvas covering one of the objects. This took a few minutes, but when they were done, Smitz just stared at what had been revealed.

That was when his boss’s last words came back to him.

Try to stay out of the helicopters , Jacobs had said.

Finally Smitz knew what the old man had meant.

0500 hours

Jazz Norton didn’t dream very much.

He didn’t know why exactly. A flight surgeon once told him that as someone who dodged flak and SAMs for a living, and who, when not in combat, flew dangerously at air shows, Norton lived a much too exciting a life to dream. After going twice the speed of sound miles above the earth on a daily basis, his subconscious needed a rest too. Besides, the doctor had asked him, what would a person like him dream about?

But this night, Norton was sure he was dreaming when he saw a ghost looking down at him from the foot of his bed.

The figure was dressed all in white. Its skin was wet and runny. With a bright light coming from behind, it looked almost transparent. A crash of thunder and a flash of lightning only added credibility to the apparition.

Norton sat up with a start, his fists clenched, ready to punch the ghost.

That was when Smitz pulled back the hood of his rain slicker to reveal his soaking-wet head.

“Sorry to bother you like this, Major,” the young CIA man was saying. “But we need you over in Hangar 2 right away.”

The storm was growing worse. Lightning flashes were tearing holes in the dark sky; thunder rumbled, shaking the tarmac right down to its foundation. And the rain was coming down in torrents. Norton and Smitz ran through the deluge, heading for Hangar 2.

“If you guys were so smart, you would have picked a better place to hide yourselves!” Norton yelled over at Smitz. “The weather here sucks!”

“Who said we were smart?” Smitz yelled back without missing a beat.

They finally reached the huge hangar and Smitz banged heavily on the front door. They could hear several techs struggling to open the big sliding piece of metal on the other side. Finally, the door was pulled back and the two men jumped inside.

Norton yanked back his hood and wiped the rainwater from his eyes. When his vision cleared, he saw before him a very strange aircraft.

Something ran through Norton at that moment; a jolt went from his head to his toes and back again. Was it adrenaline? A bit of lightning? Fear? He didn’t know. But he staggered a bit, causing Smitz to reach out and catch him.

“That’s how I felt when I saw it too,” Smitz said.

Norton took a closer look. For a tiny instant, he thought he was looking at a jet aircraft here—an elderly A-6 Intruder, to be exact. Bathed in the weird greenish hue of the hangar’s sodium lights, the snout of this odd aircraft, when viewed head-on, resembled the Intruder in a perverse way.

But in the next blink Norton knew this was no A-6. He should be so lucky. No, this thing was a helicopter. The massive rotors were proof enough. But it was a copter that had wings as well. And the cockpit was actually a double-seat tandem setup—a place for a pilot in back and a gunner up front, with bug-eyed bubble glass all round. And the wheels, though looking like a fighter jets, were squat, their attending gear very heavy. And hanging off those stunted wings were multi-barreled guns and rocket dispensers. And hundreds of different attachments—antennas, speed vanes, gun muzzles, God knows what else—seemed to be poking out all over the fuselage.

Norton blinked again. This thing was a beast—and it was staring right at him. And his first urge was to run, very fast and very far away.

“Do you know what it is?” Smitz asked him.

Yes, Norton replied. He knew exactly what it was.

It was an Mi-24 Hind. A massive Russian-built helicopter gunship.

“Where the fuck did you get this thing?” he asked Smitz incredulously.

“I can’t tell you that,” Smitz replied. “The Russians built a couple thousand of these monsters. Let’s just say we were able to procure a few.”

They walked further into the hangar. The techs who had spent all night putting the gunship together gave way with a nod from Smitz.

“Grab some coffee, guys,” he told them.

Norton was simply awestruck by the size of the helicopter. It was huge. Much bigger than an Apache or a Cobra or any attack chopper of American design.

“The Russians came up with this concept after studying our experience in Viet Nam,” Smitz explained, “They saw the pickle we were in, landing troops into hot zones with only a few machine guns sticking out of our Hueys for cover. So they set out to build a combination gunship and troop carrier. That’s why it’s so big.”

They began walking around the machine.

“It weighs 21,000 pounds empty,” Smitz continued. “Got to be the weight of at least a couple Apaches.”

“At least,” Norton said with a whistle.

“Half inch of plating around the cockpit,” Smitz went on, sounding not unlike a car salesman. “Protection for both gunner and pilot. The Russians were so afraid of getting their asses shot off in Afghanistan, they put the flight crew in steel bathtubs. Same thing for the engines and the guts. Supposedly you can take a 62-mm round in the power plants and keep flying.”

“Not bad,” Norton mumbled.

“Thick glass all round,” Smitz continued. “Those windshields have more strength than the steel tub the crew sits in. They can stop a high-caliber bullet, maybe even a cannon round or two.”