Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

Bata looked at the man, then at the airplane, and then at the briefcase full of money.

“But I can’t sell that airplane,” he stuttered. “Certainly not for two million.”

The man just smiled and said, “But you see, you have no choice in the matter. My employer wants the plane. Now. Tonight. And he always gets what he wants.”

Bata was sweating now. His superiors would never go for this. No matter who was making the offer.

He told the man as much.

“But you misunderstand,” the man replied. “This is not a payment from my employer to your government for the airplane. This is a personal payment. To you. To do with what you wish.”

The man looked at the case full of thousand-dollar bills. “And with money like this, I think my first instinct would be to resign my commission.”

With that, the man stood up, made a courteous, heel-clicking bow, and went out the door.

Bata sat for a long time looking at the money. Then finally, he took out a pen and paper and wrote out a very hasty letter of resignation. There would be no time to collect his family, of course. They would have to stay behind. But if he could get a car service tonight to carry him to Alwar, he could be anywhere—the Bahamas, South America, Monaco—by morning.

He took a handful of valuables from his desk, threw them in the briefcase, and then closed it and grabbed his hat. He looked out the window again to see that the airplane he’d essentially just been bribed for had a team of mechanics already swarming over it. He took a closer look. What were they doing?

It seemed like they were attaching some kind of elongated snout to the airplane, hastily riveting it in place. They were also painting it in an odd charcoal-gray color. One man was busy painting numbers on the underside of the fuselage. Another was standing up on the tail wing, doing the same thing.

What was this about? Bata wondered. Maybe Zim’s people were preparing the plane for an arms shipment, or for a drug run. Or maybe for a pickup of young girls for the white slavery market.

But in the next instant, Bata knew that it didn’t make a whit of difference to him what they were doing to the airplane. He took one last look around his office, sighed, shut off the lights, and left, the briefcase full of money tucked safely under his arm.

Yes, they could fly the airplane to the North Pole for all he cared.

Though he had heard that C-130’s were good for that sort of thing too.

Considering everything involved, the takeoff from Heaven 2 went well.

The platform was just long enough to fulfill the need for a running start for all five helicopters. The Halos went up first, followed by the Hinds, and then finally, the gas-laden Hook. Once airborne, they formed up at one thousand feet and headed west.

During the day, Heaven 2 had inched its way up the Persian Gulf so that by launch time, it had positioned itself just off of Bubiyan Island, a lonely spit of land near the coast of northeast Kuwait. From there, it was only a matter of thirty-five miles to Iraq. The flight plan called for them to pass over land north of Basra, in a sector known as Khorra-sul-el. It was rugged, mountainous country, with few radar sites and known to be a slice of airspace rarely traveled by Iraqi aircraft because of its proximity to the very hostile border of Iran.

Once over this region, the five choppers turned north. They stayed in the same formation they’d practiced endlessly back over the Florida Straits. The two Hinds out front, the Halos next in line, with the Hook bringing up the rear. If all went well, they would reach the mountain hiding place just before midnight.

Both Hinds were equipped with a medium-range air-threat-warning radar. They were crude setups, but enough to tell Norton and Delaney if there were any other aircraft up there with them. There wasn’t—and that was not unexpected. First of all, the Iraqi Air Force didn’t fly very much, mostly because they had so very few airplanes to fly. Secondly, nearly two thirds of the country was covered by two U.S. patrolled No-Fly zones. Only helicopters could fly in these zones, so if they were to meet anyone up here, it would most likely be another chopper. But thirdly, the Iraqis rarely flew anything—choppers or warplanes—at night. Too superstitious, was how this was once explained to Norton.

Either way, the combination of these three factors gave the small helicopter force an open sky through which to infiltrate.

Norton just couldn’t help wondering during the flight, though, if the Iraqis knew something about flying at night that he didn’t.

The unit flew for exactly ninety-three minutes, over flooded marshes, rugged hillsides, vast desert.

At 2340 hours, Norton’s GPS scope began beeping. They were nearing their landing zone. He flipped down his NightScope eyepiece and sure enough, he could see the huge mountain of Ka-el looming in the distance.

But there was a problem.

A big problem.

On the other side of the mountain was a cloud of sand so large, it looked like a tidal wave rolling in on a beach.

Norton began blinking his navigation lights madly—and soon saw Delaney flying right beside him start blinking his in return. Now the other three choppers were signaling as well. They all saw the gigantic sandstorm. The question was, what to do now?

But this really wasn’t a question at all. There were no other options. They didn’t have enough gas to turn around and go back—not without a risky nighttime air-to-air refueling.

So they had no choice.

They had to keep going.

Norton was the first one to descend through the sandstorm.

His heart was beating right out of his chest. The love affair with the Hind was on hold for the moment. High winds were buffeting the Russian chopper all the way down. It sounded like he was being hit with a million rocks, especially around the canopy. He hoped the much-ballyhooed protection for the Hind’s power plants would prove true. Just one gust of sand sucked up into the copter’s engines, and it would be lights out forever.

Four hundred feet from landing and he was fighting the controls mightily. The Hind was great at going forward, but hovering was not one of its fortes. He was doing his best to keep the chopper level, but his biggest problem now was not the fiercely blowing sands, but something more devious: disorientation.

Keeping an airplane steady in relation to the ground was a hard enough job. Holding a chopper level in zero visibility was a real chore. It was really a mind-over-matter thing. The eyes won’t believe what the instruments are telling them, and the pilot puts the aircraft in a position he thinks is level. Trouble is, the instruments are almost always right—and the pilot’s instincts almost always wrong. There were recorded instances of chopper pilots running into sandstorms or heavy rain and actually turning themselves upside down—until they tried to land or went into a mountain. Disorientation was like breathing. If you thought too much about it, you got all fucked up.

At that moment Norton was trying his best not to think about either.

The chatter from his radio was not helping. All attention to security gone, the Army Aviation pilots were calling out numbers and positions to one another in breathlessly clipped fashion, a sure sign the pilots were getting stressed. Even Delaney was sounding a little nervous, yelling out his altitude readings as if the very sound of his voice was enough to will his chopper to the ground in one piece.

But finally, just like that, Norton broke through the bottom of the storm. He caught a quick, glimpse of the cliff face, and knew that he was much lower than he’d thought and going way too fast. He immediately gave the stick a yank and increased power. The front of the chopper bucked upwards, slamming his helmet against the top of canopy.