Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

A second later, there was a mighty bump, a bounce, and a large crashing sound. And then nothing.

He was down.

Norton began frantically shutting down all the crucial systems aboard the Hind, lowering his electrical exposure as quickly as he could. His headphones were filled with the stern relief of the other pilots as they too broke free of the sandstorm and came down on the deck— hard, but at least in one piece.

“Truck One down!”

“Truck Two down… copy.”

“Pumper down… and breathing…”

“Damn! Ouch … Hound Dog Two here …”

Norton smiled a moment. The last report was from Delaney. His chopper bounced in not a hundred feet from Norton’s own. His partner was just barely visible through the continuing swirl of sand.

Then the radios went silent again.

The wind got louder; the sandstorm was descending on top of them now. All sight of Delaney and the other choppers was quickly gone. Norton rechecked his control panel; everything that had to be shut down was off. Only the bare minimum of instruments were still lit.

He did a quick GPS check and confirmed that they had come down in the middle of the grid they had planned for. They were on the vast cliff halfway down the high mountain. The satellite systems never lied.

He killed the GPS screen, and found himself suddenly surrounded by complete darkness. The sand swirling, the wind screaming the aircraft rocking back and forth. Darkness…

He hated it.

But then an idea hit him. He turned on his NightScope and sure enough, he could see the Marines, pouring out of the choppers, some of them going into their defensive ring despite the howling winds. Others he could see running up to the waterfall of vines and pulling them aside. Thank goodness, there was a cave behind them.

“Hot damn!” Norton heard himself say for the first time in his life.

The next thing he knew, he was moving. He pressed his face against the cockpit window and saw two ghostly faces staring back in at him. They were air techs, two of the dozen who were part of the mission. All twelve were all around his chopper now. They were pushing it toward the cave opening. Just as they were supposed to.

Once inside the cavern, Norton could finally see again. He just stared out at the place. It was enormous, as big as if not bigger than Hangar 2 back at Seven Ghosts Key. The Marines already had a generator hooked up, and now some very dim bulbs were burning within. It gave everything, and everyone, a very ghostly appearance. And true enough, he could see bats fluttering around on the ceiling of the place.

Norton could hear voices and lots of banging. Finally he reached over and undid the clasp on his cockpit window. Someone on the other side flipped the glass door upwards. It was Delaney.

“Welcome to Bat Cave,” he said.

The sun rose hot and burning over the hard desert.

The night had passed without incident in the cave. The Marines had dispensed a battery of motion detectors all over the flattened cliff as well as hanging many over the side of the mountain itself. Two squads of Marines had spent the night out on the ledge. Well hidden in their unmarked, Iraqi-style camouflage uniforms, they had set up powerful NightScopes, one pointing in just about every direction possible from the cliff’s location. The combination of the motion detectors and the NightScopes gave them eyes and ears that extended out for miles.

About a half mile from the base of the mountain, there was a highway that ran east to west. It was known to be little traveled, and true to form, not a single vehicle was seen on the roadway all night. In fact the unit’s electronic picket line had detected no movements—other than nocturnal animals—anywhere near the hiding spot.

By 0500, Norton and Delaney were ready to go.

The air techs had worked all night getting the Hinds in shape to do the first recon flight. Most of the long hours were spent extracting sand from critical systems. Norton and Delaney did their own extensive preflight inspection as well. Their weapons check went well, as did a communications test. Everything seemed to be in order aboard the tough Russian gunships.

They could only pray it would stay that way.

The Hinds were finally pushed out of the cave and into the dim sunlight at 0530 hours.

There was still an hour before sunrise. A sweep of the area proved their position had still not been compromised. The picket line of Marines on the cliff’s edge reported no activity in evidence, no traffic on the road to their south. Nothing flying anywhere overhead.

Norton and Delaney started their engines. The Russian choppers responded with the usual bang and storm of fire and smoke. But within seconds, the big rotors began turning, and soon were whirring with unbridled Russian efficiency.

They took off cleanly. Using extra power and the hard sand in front of the cave as their runway, they were up and away in less than 250 feet. The pair of Hinds immediately climbed up to five hundred feet and turned northwest. The first of what would probably be many recon flights was under way at last.

The desert now spread before them like a vast, golden vista. Norton had seen it before, of course. Nearly ten years ago, during Desert Storm, he’d flown over some of this same landscape. It was flat hard terrain in this region mostly, interspersed with rugged low hills. Moonlike. Desolate. Beautiful in the oddest way.

They flew northeast, following a course suggested to them by Smitz’s CIA bosses. They passed over a few scattered villages, some goat herds, some wheat fields, the occasional roadway. It was still very early in the morning, and very few people could be seen about. Those that did see the choppers had no noticeable reaction, even though flying as low as they were, the racket they were making must have been unbearable. Maybe this was what the people had come to expect from the Iraqi military. Waking up early to the sound of helicopter gunships was the least of their problems.

The open spaces and the sparseness of the land aided Norton and Delaney greatly in preserving their cover. And again, their disguise was simple. The sight of two Hinds roaring through the sky at sunrise was nothing new to anyone who spotted them from the ground.

Just as long as they acted like they were Iraqis, they would stay out of trouble.

They flew for forty minutes. Hugging the contours of the earth, following the flight plan, Delaney was leading the way, Norton off his wing.

Over the lowest of the Bala Ruz Mountains, between the Tariq-sum Hills, up and along the A1 Vzayn River, skirting the edge of Baghdad’s suburbs, and then moving northeast towards the Divala River basin.

It was odd, because it would have seemed that in a combat-imminent situation, one’s mind would be focused to the max. But this morning, for whatever reason, Norton’s thoughts began to wander.

What would happen if he and Delaney returned to the cave after this recon to find their position had been compromised and everyone butchered? A grisly thought, Norton told himself. Almost too grisly to enter his mind. Besides, if they had been compromised, wouldn’t they have been intercepted by now? Or would they find Fulcrums waiting for them when they returned to the hiding spot?

How about the gunship’s original crew? What were the chances that they’d all survived ten years of captivity? Would they be like Buchenwald prisoners when they were finally freed? Would they be insane? Brainwashed? Would their families still be waiting for them? Would they be heroes once they got home? Would they be hounded by the press? Asked to write books? Do the talk show circuit? Make movie deals?

Norton blinked, and suddenly he was inside the accursed Tin Can simulator again. In all those hours of training he never did figure out a way to nail the T-72 tank before the Fulcrums—or the SAMs or the AAA guns—nailed him. Maybe that was the reasoning behind the simulator training after all. Maybe that was a problem that just couldn’t be solved. Maybe he was actually on a suicide mission here, just another piece of fodder given up so the U.S. military could get back something it should never have lost in the first place.