Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

“Too real,” Norton said, nudging him a little further towards the Russian-built gunship. “But it’s a beauty, isn’t it?”

“It’s a piece of shit,” Delaney replied. “And if you got me up to go for a ride in this thing, you wasted your time and mine.”

He began to walk away again. Smitz blocked his retreat.

“You’re the one wasting time, Major,” the CIA officer told him. “This bird has to go up on a shakeout flight. And we need someone to fly front seat. And that someone is you.”

Delaney turned back to Norton.

“Don’t tell me you know how to fly this thing,” he said.

Norton just shrugged. “They seem to think I can. And if I can’t, then they’re going to put you behind the wheel. Because there’s one in the back of the building for you too.”

Delaney squinted his eyes to see that, indeed, there was a crew of air techs praying over a second Hind gunship.

Delaney put his hands to his face and just shook his head. “Gawd… I’d give anything to be flying poodles around again. Anything…”

Smitz stepped forward, his NoteBook out, its screen blinking in the muggy post-storm breeze.

“We’ve got a satellite window of three hours coming up,” he said. “We’ve got to get this thing started, taxied out, and airborne. Like right now…”

Delaney looked as if he could have punched the CIA man. But then his face brightened a bit. His mind had switched to another mode.

“Let me ask you something, Smitty,” he said. “If we’re in such a secret place that no enemy of this country knows we are here, then whose satellites are you so worried about passing over and seeing us?”

Smitz just shrugged. “Our own, of course,” he replied simply.

Norton wiped his brow at that one. It was getting very hot, very quickly. The bad dream was continuing.

He turned Delaney back toward the Hind.

“Let’s just get this over with, OK?” he said.

Norton and Delaney pulled on a pair of helmets, strapped themselves into parachutes, and climbed up the access ladder to the Hind’s tandem cockpit. A squad of air techs was buzzing around the gunship now. They seemed to know what they were doing, Norton thought. Or they were giving a good impression that they did.

Delaney eased himself into the forward compartment through a hinged thick-glass door that looked not unlike something found in a gull-wing sports car. He settled into the seat, which was comfortably plush, leather-covered, and sturdy. The number of dials and buttons and buzzers in this compartment rivaled those in the pilot’s hold in back. There was a spare set of flight controls in the gunner’s seat, but Delaney was cautious not to put his feet anywhere near the rudder pedals or his hands anywhere near the stick.

An air tech appeared beside him and plugged a wire from his helmet into one of dozens of inputs on the multi-layered control panel. This done, he slapped Delaney twice on the head—and a second later, Delaney could hear Norton’s voice through his headphones.

“Ever see leather seats on an American bird?” Norton asked him.

“Yeah, they’re real comfy,” Delaney replied. “This thing have a CD player?”

“More likely an eight-track,” Norton told him. “You see a primary switchboard up there?”

Delaney scanned the control panel—that was when he first noticed just about everything was labeled in Russian. But a few primary systems had masking tape covering up their Cyrillic nameplates with hastily scrawled English printed over them. Most said the word: “Override.” Delaney started switching them all with wild abandon.

“Tell me when to stop,” he called back to Norton.

Meanwhile, Norton was switching on all of his own masking-tape-labeled switches, going systematically from left to right. He could hear things begin to whir, and the sounds were vaguely familiar to him. Where had he heard all this before? Then it hit him—in the simulator; these were the sounds they had piped into his headphones during his crash course inside the accursed Tin Can.

A tech started hand-signaling him.

“Want to move it out now?” he was asking Norton.

Norton just shrugged. “Sure, why not.”

With that the squad of techs began pushing the huge gunship out of the hangar, with Smitz and a few guards lending a hand.

Out in the bright sunshine the cockpit began warming up quickly. By the time they were on the tarmac, Norton had completed all of his switching. Everything seemed to be set—green lights indicated each system was online and ready to go.

Now it was time to start the engines. Smitz had given him a photocopied, heavily edited version of the Hind’s translated flight manual. Norton now had it in his lap, opened to the page entitled: “How to Start the Engines.”

“Hang on, partner,” he called ahead to Delaney after reading the instructions. “This could be interesting.”

He saw Delaney tighten his helmet and assume a crash position. Norton did one last check of the bizarre control panel, and then activated the switch marked APU. This stood for Auxiliary Power Unit, a kind of outside battery pack that would jump-start the gunship’s two powerful engines. Or at least that was the plan.

But when Norton hit the APU panel, he heard an explosion that sounded like it was ripping the big gunship apart. There was a bright flash of red from behind him, the reflection lighting up the cockpit. He turned and saw a six-foot flame shooting out of the APU vent.

Shit…

This did not look good. Norton was convinced that he’d blown off the rear end of the copter somehow. He looked down at the air techs and saw panic wash across their faces. In front of him Delaney was already struggling with the clasp on his cockpit door, in the first stages of abandoning of the aircraft.

But before full-blown hysteria could set in, Norton saw Smitz run into his field of vision, simultaneously waving and flashing the thumbs-up sign—while still looking worriedly towards the rear of the copter.

“It always starts up like that!” he was yelling up at them.

“Damn!” Norton heard Delaney curse in his headphones. “I thought we’d blown the fucking thing up and gotten out of this.”

And a moment later, sure enough, the huge rotor began turning over their heads. Now the gunship was rocking back and forth with a mighty vibration, lifting Norton an inch or so off his seat.

“Jeesuz, are you sure we’re not on fire!” Delaney yelled into his microphone.

Norton wasn’t sure. He did a scan of the control panel and found the warning light that he believed would indicate an engine fire. It was safely on green.

“Just hang on,” he called ahead to Delaney. “We aren’t even having fun yet.”

The crew chief was hand-signaling him again. Norton got the message right away. He and Delaney were to seal their cockpits.

Norton told Delaney to button up, then did the same. And that was when everything seemed to change. When the door clamped down and was sealed, it became very quiet within the gunship. The only sound Norton could hear besides the whupp-whupp-whupp of the increasingly spinning rotors was the soft rush of air. The Hind’s cockpits were pressurized, a luxury Norton didn’t believe was afforded to many American chopper pilots.

“Hey, cool, I can hear my heart beating again,” Delaney called out from in front. “Or, at least I think it’s my heart.”

Norton got another signal from his crew chief. The rotors were turning at full throttle now. He waved the man off, and the small army of techs began moving away from the gunship.

He consulted the crude instruction book, turning to the page detailing a quick course on how the Hind should get into the air. He began reading as fast as he could.