Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

They began a series of blinking light signals with the C-130. Altitude, flight speed, and so on were transmitted between the two aircraft. Once all these things were out of the way, the refueling could begin in earnest.

The long snake-like hose began unreeling from the C-130’s left wing. Ricco managed to twist the chopper to line up with the fuel hose.

“OK, I need your eyeballs now, Gilly,” Ricco said. “Guide me in.”

“OK,” Gillis said, eyes glued on the hose as they drew closer to it. “Up a hair. Over… left. Good! Stay. Whoops—go up. A little. Little more. There! That’s it. You’re golden.”

The fuel hose was now right above their heads. Their receptacle was four feet behind their line of sight, but it had a long spout on it and with a jerk of a controls, Ricco slammed the probe into the end of the hose.

“Contact!” Gillis yelled out. The series of green lights popping up on his control window confirmed they were hooked.

Ricco began flipping governor switches now. When they got a clear-flow situation-lamp light, they would know they were ready to take on gas. The light blinked on a second later. Ricco began flashing his nav lights madly. The C-130 pilots flashed theirs in return. A moment later gas began flowing through the C-130’s hose into the Hook’s receptacle, through the temporary piping, and into the fuel bladders in the back of the huge chopper.

That was when the chopper started sputtering again.

“Sheeeet!” Gillis cursed. “This is not good….”

Suddenly the chopper was all over the sky.

“We’re losing power in the left plant!” Gillis yelled to Ricco.

The chopper was now tipping out of balance.

“Damn! The left engine is failing!” Gillis yelled.

Ricco didn’t reply. He was too busy trying to hold the chopper steady and hooked to the fuel hose.

“Can this thing fly on just one engine?” Gillis was asking.

They weren’t sure.

Now another problem. They could both smell the stink of gas. This was enough to make Ricco take his eyes off the hose hookup and look over at Gillis. There was terror on his partner’s face. Fumes were filling the cockpit very rapidly now. But where were they coming from?

“Either one of the fuel bladders is leaking,” Gillis said, answering the question before it was asked, “or we got fuel coming out of the failing left-side engine.”

“You gotta go check!” Ricco yelled back over to him.

Gillis was already unstrapping from his seat. With the slightest electrical spark, they’d both be blown to Kingdom Come—and probably take the C-130 tanker with them.

Gillis had to crawl back into the rear of the huge chopper on his hands and knees, so violently was the big Hook bouncing all over the sky. Using his penlight, he checked the bladders both front and back. They were slowly filling with the gas from the C-130, just as they were supposed to. The fumes were very thick back here, but he could see no leaks in either of the two huge gas bags.

This was not good. Gillis began crawling back to the cockpit. He’d wished the bags were leaking instead of the gas smell coming from the engines. If they had a fuel leak in the power plants, the possibility of an explosion increased about tenfold.

Gillis had trouble getting back into his seat, that was how much the big chopper was jumping all over the sky now. He looked at the fuel-take-on meter and saw they were only halfway through the refueling. The smell of gas was so bad, and the engines’ power dropping so quickly, he couldn’t imagine them surviving this flight.

“Should we disconnect?” Ricco yelled over to him.

“We’ve only taken on five hundred pounds,” Gillis yelled back. “That’s nowhere near enough. We’ve got to hang with it!”

So that was what they did. They stayed on course, took on gas for the unit, all the while waiting for the bright flash and the searing flames that would so horribly end their lives.

But it never came. The next two minutes passed like an eternity, but finally, the bladders had reached their full point. Now came the tricky part: disengaging. Ricco started easing the chopper away by reducing throttle. With the precision of a surgeon, he gently began extracting their receptacle probe from the fuel hose.

But then Gillis saw a bright flash off to their right. For a moment he thought he was seeing double. Suddenly he realized there was another plane next to the tanker. Another plane that looked just like it.

Another C-130…

There was another flash. Then another. And another.

It was on that third flash that Gillis finally realized what was going on.

“Damn!” he yelled. “It’s the freaking ArcLight!”

Ricco looked up and sure enough, saw the ghostly black gunship riding right next to the refueling tanker. Its guns were blazing away at it.

“Christ! Disconnect! ” Gillis was yelling.

Purely on reaction, Ricco hit the full-disengage button. The Hook’s receptacle opened up and the tanker’s fuel hose came out, spraying aviation gas everywhere.

The tanker blew up an instant later.

The explosion was blinding. All Gillis could see were pieces of metal and wire and glass flying right at him, all of it on fire.

Somehow Ricco was able to pitch the big chopper away from the gigantic fireball. But it was a very violent maneuver. The fuel bags went one way and the chopper went another, and soon they were looking straight down at the Persian Gulf rushing up at them.

“This is not good!” Gillis was yelling out.

Ricco was battling the controls, but it was already hopeless. The Hook was falling way too fast and weighed too much to get under control.

They’d lost all sight of the ArcLight by now. The sky around them was filled with the burning debris of the C-130 tanker plane. And they were falling with it, very rapidly.

It was strange then, because Ricco just looked over at Gillis and extended his hand. Gillis took it and shook it heartily.

“Sorry, buddy,” Ricco said. “I really am….”

Gillis just shook his head as the Hook went nose-over.

“Not your fault, pal,” he said calmly. “Not at all…”

If possible, things were even worse back at the Bat Cave.

It was now 0630 hours. The fuel chopper was so overdue, the unit had given up on it.

What had happened to the Pumper? There was no way of knowing. The unit had no means of getting the Hook on the radio or of getting a message sent by the fuel chopper back to them.

But an even larger problem had arisen.

By an incredible stroke of bad luck, there had been a traffic accident on the one section of the desolate highway that ran closest to the mouth of the cave on Ka-el. It had happened about an hour after the fuel chopper left. A large truck carrying some kind of liquid had flipped over on the curve, completely blocking the roadway not a half mile from the base of the mountain.

The screech of the truck’s brakes had nearly deafened the Marines monitoring the listening devices along the cliff’s edge. Immediately turning their NightScopes oh the wreck, they saw the driver stumble from his smashed cab and collapse on the side of the road. The Marines simply couldn’t believe it. The first vehicle of any type to travel the highway since the unit reached the cave had crashed just a sneeze’s length away from their hideout.

Smitz, Chou, Norton, and Delaney were immediately summoned to the ledge. Scanning the area with powerful NightScope binoculars, they could see the truck couldn’t have wound up in a worse position: lengthwise, with its cab lodged firmly between two boulders on the north side of the highway and its trailer, twisted and split in two, dug deeply into the asphalt on the south side. The truck was also leaking something—maybe even gasoline, ironically enough. If that ignited, the glow would be seen for miles.