Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

Smitz finally got out of bed and stumbled into his pants and shirt. He was used to these late-night interruptions by now. They had a certain rhythm to them. The fax would take sixty seconds to print out, long enough for him to reheat a half-filled cup of coffee from earlier that night. He slipped it into his microwave, and then visited the head. The fax machine and the micro beeped at exactly the same time. “Message received,” he typed into its keyboard. The machine clicked twice and then went silent.

He took his coffee from the micro, burning his fingers in the process. Finally he sat down to read the missive.

The cover sheet was protecting a photograph Smitz recognized as being shot from an aerial recon camera called an ICQ-23. It was a secret type used on U-2’s and some versions of the new RF-18 Navy recon fighter.

The photo showed a smoldering hunk of metal in the midst of an oil-slicked sea. Smitz didn’t know whether he was looking at the remains of a ship or an airplane or something else. It took the explanation on page three to tell him this was all that was left of an oil platform in the upper Persian Gulf known as Qak-Six.

The summary was brief. There were 322 people dead. No known survivors. The rig was perforated with holes, big and small. They were almost symmetrical in their placement. Smitz bit his lip. There was no doubt in his mind what horror had been visited on the oil platform. The AC-130 had struck again.

No sooner had he finished reading the grim report when his fax began beeping again. He hit the Receive button and started another blurry photo printing out.

This one he watched from the first moment of its inception, and as it scrolled out, he felt his eyes go wider and his jaw drop lower. There was no mystery about this image. It was a high-altitude photo of a ship, one that was in the process of sinking. It was obviously taken from a passing satellite just seconds before the vessel slipped beneath the waves. In the very northwest corner of the photo was a very small indication that looked like the rear end of an airplane in retreat.

Below the picture was a simple caption. “USS LaSallette C3 vessel sinking this day 705 hours GMT. With loss of all life.”

“Damn,” Smitz breathed.

He was still staring at the photo when his phone rang. The noise startled him so much he whacked his head on the ceiling of his tiny billet. He leapt for the phone, snagged the receiver, pulled on the cord, and finally brought it up to his ear. His eyes passed over the hands of his luminescent watch. It was 3:15 in the morning.

Who the fuck could this be?

The man’s voice at the other end sounded very far away.

“Hold for the President,” he said.

This night had started out pretty much like any other for Norton and Delaney.

They’d lifted off about 2300 hours with Norton in the pilot’s seat of the Hind and Delaney riding up front.

Their first order of business was to transit fifty-five miles out in the Caribbean and do a routine navigation exercise around a spit of land called Whiskey Rocks. After this, they linked up with the other choppers and practiced formation night flying and refueling exercises. This completed, they all returned to base. While the other choppers were done for the night, Norton and Delaney took on more fuel, switched positions, and then took off again. They had two more hours of flying time available, and Delaney wanted to get more time behind the wheel. Yet no sooner were they airborne when they got a call from the base telling them to return immediately.

This had never happened before. They turned around, both thinking that the satellite window was closing sooner than anticipated. But as soon as they were down again, they saw the ground crew meander out of Hangar 2 to take care of the chopper. They didn’t seem to be in any hurry, indicating a satellite pass-over was not the problem. It had to be something else.

With Delaney agreeing to watch over the care and handling of the Hind, Norton hurried over to the Big Room to find out what was up.

He burst in, like a kid late for class, to find most of the usual suspects were there. Smitz, Rooney, Ricco, and Gillis, of course. The SEALs. The Army pilots. The CIA security people. As Norton was walking in, they were all starting on their way out. Everyone looked grim. No one said a word to him as they passed by.

“Jeesuz, what’s happened?” Norton asked Smitz, who was trying to hurry out of the room himself.

“The people running the gunship just fucked up,” he said breathlessly. “They sank a Navy C-3 ship. In the Gulf. Two hundred guys went down with it. They also nailed an oil platform, killed everyone on board that too.”

Norton just stared back at him, letting the news sink in.

“A Navy spy ship? Damn, that’s not good,” he mumbled.

“As a result, we just got our orders, right from the top,” Smitz told him, each word landing like a hammer blow to Norton’s stomach. “We’re moving out. Now.”

“Now?” Norton asked incredulously. “You mean like today?”

“No, I mean as in ‘now,’” Smitz replied. “ Right now . The transport planes will be here in ten minutes. We take off in one hour.”

Norton shook his head as if to clear it.

“Wait a minute,” he began to protest. “We’re not ready to go anywhere. We’ve been barely flying those choppers for a week. No way are we ready for combat. I thought the plan was for thirty days of practice.”

“Well, the plan just changed,” Smitz said, turning to leave. “Don’t ask me why, but when the gunship was shooting up refugees and villages, it just wasn’t this high a priority. But now it is. So we’re moving out.”

He started for the door again, but Norton grabbed him.

“Wait a minute! We haven’t even been briefed on the fucking mission yet,” he protested. “Not on the operational stuff anyway. How are we supposed to know what the hell to do?”

Smitz pushed his hand away.

“We’ll get our final briefing once we’re on-site,” Smitz said. “Now, I want you to find Delaney, get suited up, and both of you get down to the flight line, ASAP! I’ve got to go wake the Marines.”

With that, Smitz ran out the door.

Norton was suddenly alone in the big empty room with the garish murals. The one by the front door looked particularly eerie at this moment. Norton stared at it, then felt a shudder run through him.

The three jumbo black women with pots on their heads were really laughing at him now.

Ten minutes later, he stumbled into the preflight ready room.

He’d looked all over for Delaney. In Hangar 2, back at their billet, out on the flight line. But his partner had disappeared. No one seemed to know where he was. Nor was Norton in any mood to search any further for him. Let someone else deliver the bad news. At the moment, he needed time to absorb it himself.

He always had nerves before any combat mission—any pilot who denied this was lying. But in every mission Norton had ever flown, he’d made a point of checking, double-checking, and triple-checking every last detail before his feet ever left the ground. This was the reason he’d been to war many times and had come back without so much as a scratch.

But now, he and the others were being rushed into a very dangerous situation, probably the worst thing anyone could do when it came to combat. Despite how well they had all taken to their foreign-built choppers, they were still not fully prepared for this. Far from it. No operational briefing? No idea where they were going exactly? No more than a few live-firing exercises? It was a recipe for disaster.