Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

Ricco looked out the cockpit window back down at him.

“What are you? An asshole?” he yelled to Norton.

With that, they began the process of getting their huge engines going.

Chou did a quick check of his picket line; an electronic sweep of the area said no one was around. He gave the Hook’s pilots the signal and seconds later, the engines exploded and the rotor blades began spinning.

There were some last-minute checks, but finally the air techs gave Ricco the thumbs-up. The pilot hit the throttles and the huge beast started ascending, creating a great storm of dust and sand in its wake.

The Hook rose nearly straight up into the night sky. No nav lights, just the exhaust and the flare from the engines indicating its position. Very soon it was hardly visible at all.

Delaney was standing next to Norton, braving the dust storm and watching the chopper disappear into the starry night. Soon they couldn’t even hear it anymore.

“You know something,” Delaney said, resignation thick in his voice.

“What’s that?”

“If those guys fuck up up there,” he said, “then we’re really fucked down here. No matter what Angel told us. No fuel. No way to get out. No way to even get down from this goddamn mountain. And if what Angel said is right, there’s no way they’ll ever send anyone out here to get us.”

Norton shielded his eyes against the bright moonlight, trying in vain to see the last image of the Hook flying away.

“My thoughts exactly,” he said.

On a playground near Rye, New Hampshire, nine-year-old Ryan Gillis was playing baseball all by himself.

It was early evening. A Friday. The sun was setting. It was still hot. Ryan was hitting the ball off the end of the bat, trying to get it to go straight up in the air. Whenever he was successful in doing this, he would hurriedly put on his glove and attempt to catch the ball as it was coming back down. In thirty minutes of trying, he’d accomplished this complicated feat exactly twice.

All this would have been easier if he had someone to play catch with—God knows he needed the practice. But these days, Ryan had been practicing mostly by himself.

Tomorrow was a big day for him. At noon, he would be playing in his first ever Little League game. He hadn’t slept much just thinking about it. Ever since the coach told him Wednesday that for Saturday’s game Ryan would be in right field for Susan Mantosh because she was getting fitted for braces, his heart hadn’t stopped pounding. He’d made sure his mother had washed and pressed his unused uniform— twice . He’d bought new socks with his own paper route money, and had scrubbed his sneakers clean more than a half-dozen times in the past two days. He knew to play good, he had to look good. Or at least that was what his coach always told him.

Early Friday night was usually the time he and his father played catch. It was only that Dad had spent hours playing toss with him that he’d been good enough to make the Wickes Hardware Junior Tigers in the first place, even if it was as a benchwarmer. Now, Ryan would have given anything to have Dad see him start his first real game.

But Dad was not home these days.

Just around the time he’d gotten out of school for summer vacation, his mother told him Dad would be away for two weeks. At first Ryan thought no more about it. He knew his father was a big shot with the Air National Guard. He was away for two weeks a lot. But Dad had been away for more than a month now—and Mom told him the night before she wasn’t sure now when he’d be coming home.

Where was he? Mom just didn’t know. She guessed that maybe he was overseas, on a very special mission, picked especially by the President. How cool would that be? Ryan thought. But when he told the neighborhood kids this, they just laughed at him. Air National Guard guys never went on special missions, the kids said. They were just guys who cleaned up after the real soldiers.

And after a while, Ryan started to believe them.

The helicopter first began sputtering somewhere over the Shawar region of Iraq.

Ricco and Gillis groaned at the same time when they first heard the disturbing noise. They were ten minutes away from crossing over the coastline to the Persian Gulf. If trouble was coming, they would much rather be over solid ground—helicopters usually sank quicker than airplanes, and they certainly did not want to go down in the Gulf without the opportunity of sending out a distress call. But their orders said they had to maintain radio silence, no matter what. And this they would do.

The first real indication of trouble came about twenty minutes after taking off from the Bat Cave. The electrical output monitor had started fluctuating. Their control panel lights began blinking, with some losing function for as long as a minute or two. These were worrisome things—but not enough to force them to turn back.

But then, just as the coastline came into view north of Basra, their oil pressure gauge indicated a 20-percent drop. And the sputtering began.

Then they began to smell smoke.

“Damn,” Gillis whispered, strangely. “My kid’s playing Little League today.”

Ricco didn’t even hear him. He was pushing buttons and throwing switches—and making sure the copter’s engines were still working right. They were. But they sounded awful.

“Shit, now what?” Ricco was saying more to himself than anything else. This was a real problem. Up to this point, the big Russian chopper had performed nearly flawlessly. Since that first flight from Seven Ghosts, through all the drilling, through the voyage here and the transit to the cliff cave, to the refueling after the raid, the Hook had not given them one whit of trouble.

But now, on their most important mission, the thing had decided to get cranky.

“We still have adequate pressure and adequate juice,” Gillis reported, doing a quick diagnostic scan of their controls. “I say we continue.”

Ricco just shook his head in disgust. “What other choice do we have? We got to pick up the gas just to get ourselves back to the cave. We ain’t got enough to go back, fix this thing, then come out and meet the tanker again.”

“Unless we just land near someplace friendly,” Gillis said under his breath.

Ricco ignored him because he knew his partner didn’t mean it. At least, he hoped he didn’t.

They flew on, Ricco doing the piloting, Gillis watching the small laptop that was serving as their navigation system. In ten minutes they were over the deep waters of the Gulf and approaching the rendezvous point—five minutes too early.

This was not a good thing.

“Our gas is so low we must have a fuel leak somewhere,” Ricco said, tapping the fuel gauge readout, hoping it would suddenly show more fuel.

Suddenly both of them knew just how valuable they’d been when they were out looking for lost and drained airplanes over the Atlantic. It was not a pleasant feeling to be on the other end.

“Christ,” Ricco said, “We’re at half reserves. If this keeps up, we might not have any choice but to get our feet wet.”

“Not to worry,” Gillis said, his voice suddenly calm. “Our friends are here.”

Ricco looked up and sure enough, he could see the navigation lights of the refueling tanker. It was a Marine C-130, about a mile ahead and maybe a thousand feet above them, breaking out of a huge cumulous cloud. There were red lights all over it. They began blinking. It was a beautiful sight.

But now came the hard part. Ricco and Gillis had hooked up many times with C-130’s during their night drills. But never under real conditions. Essentially, their most important role in the whole mission came down to what they would do in the next five minutes.