Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

“Jeesuz!” Chou cried out. “They actually got the fuel?”

“Those guys are nuts flying that thing back here!” Delaney added to the din. “One spark and this whole fucking mountain will go up!”

The next thing he knew, Norton was on his feet, running towards the wreck. Air techs were scrambling out of the cave, many with fire extinguishers in hand. They quickly began hosing down the burning aircraft. But there was no sign of movement in the cockpit.

In seconds Norton was boosting himself up onto the twisted wing of the Hook, Delaney close behind. The lower side access door was crumpled. There would be no way of getting in from there. Smoke was pouring from the main cargo bay door. That way was blocked too. Norton only had one other choice. He climbed up to the top of the fuselage and crawled over to the cockpit window itself. He peered inside. He could see Ricco and Gillis, slumped over, still strapped in their seats. They looked dead. The fumes were nearly overwhelming.

Now Delaney was at his side, and together they began pounding on the cockpit glass with their rifle butts. But the strong panes would not budge. No surprise. They were bullet-proof just like the glass on the Hinds.

“What should we do?” Delaney was yelling over at Norton. “We can’t shoot it out!”

Suddenly, a fire ax appeared between them. It hit one window with such force, the glass exploded into thousands of pieces. They looked down and saw Smitz standing on the twisted nose below. There was a fire in his eye they’d never seen before.

“C’mon!” he was yelling. “Get them out of there!”

Norton reached through the busted window and grabbed Ricco by the scruff of his neck. The window frame was just large enough to squeeze the injured pilot out, but it was like pulling deadweight. It took all of his strength, but somehow Norton managed to extract him.

Then Smitz hit the next window over with the ax; it too burst in a cloud of tiny pieces. Delaney reached in this hole and pulled Gillis’s long lanky frame out. All around them, the air techs were dousing them and the chopper with mountains of foam. The heavy smoke was everywhere—which was a good thing. The haze was so thick it prevented the Iraqis on the highway from seeing the rescue efforts.

Yet no sooner had they lowered both pilots to the ground when Chou ran up. He was coughing from the fumes and smoke; so much, he couldn’t talk. So he just pointed to the highway. Norton took one look and immediately felt his heart sink to his boots. A half-dozen trucks had split away from the Iraqi column and were racing for the cliff at full speed.

“We got about five minutes before they get here,” Chou finally spat out. “Maybe another five before they realize we ain’t towelheads and radio back to the column. Then we’re fucked!”

Smitz took a few seconds to appraise the situation, and then nodded in grim agreement.

“There’s only one thing we can do,” he said.

He turned to the cluster of air techs surrounding the wrecked fuel chopper and yelled his next order at the top of his lungs.

“Start pumping this gas out— now! ”

Lieutenant Ali Alida el-Sheesh had had a very long day.

He was the officer in charge of the engineering unit attached to the column that was now stalled on Highway 55.

The column had left Abu Ahl earlier the day before, and had been traveling for more than twenty hours when they came upon the jackknifed truck. It was a delay they could not afford. The column was already overdue for exercises in Dawrah, which was a suburb of Baghdad itself. Several troop trucks had already broken down, costing time and patience as the column’s commanding officer, the hated Major Tariq Tziz, pondered over which trucks should be fixed and which ones simply pushed to the side of the road to be collected later. The decision on whether a truck was fixable actually came down to Lieutenant Ali and his men. They were called engineers, but in effect they were glorified mechanics. Whenever anything went wrong with the column’s vehicles, Major Tziz would call on Ali’s troop—and Allah help them if the work wasn’t done quickly and efficiently.

So the radio call went back to Ali when the column came upon the overturned truck. Tziz was screaming in the microphone at him as usual, telling him to hurry up. But the top officer had no idea what it was like for Ali to get his men and equipment from the end of the convoy all the way up to the front. Engineers should always be placed at the front of the column, but Tziz considered them too low-class for such an exalted position.

When Ali finally reached the scene of the truck’s accident, he was stumped. The truck was twisted in such a way that it could not be straightened out either mechanically or manually. Its gas tank was leaking fuel everywhere, and there was a great danger of fire. So the first thing Ali did was have his men cover the fuel on the roadway with sand. But how to move the huge eighteen-wheel beast? He didn’t have a clue.

After studying the situation with Major Tziz and his bad breath breathing down his neck, Ali came to only one conclusion. They couldn’t push the truck without significant damage to their own vehicles—even one of the tanks would have a hard time with it, even if they could get one down off its flatbed. They couldn’t blow the truck up, as that might damage the road to the extent that the column could not pass at all. They couldn’t radio back for a heavy towing vehicle from Abu Ahl, as that would take too long.

In Ali’s opinion, then there was only one thing to do. Call ahead to Dawrah and ask that a heavy-lift helicopter be sent to the site. If the chopper’s winch could be attached to the truck, it might be able to move it enough to allow the column to pass.

With much huffing and spitting, Major Tziz finally agreed to the plan.

But this was where it really got strange.

No sooner had Major Tziz made the request to Dawrah base, when a helicopter appeared in the sky. It was a heavy-lifter—a Russian-built Hook. Just the type that the column needed to move the disabled truck.

But something was wrong here. There was no way that the message for help could have been acted on so quickly. Secondly, the helicopter looked to be on fire and about to crash.

When the huge chopper flew right over them and continued north, toward the sheer mountain, Major Tziz cried out: “Why does he not land here, with us?”

“Perhaps he is afraid he’ll injure us if he crashes,” Ali replied.

A few moments later, the helicopter went right into the mountain.

Or so it appeared. Because when the smoke and fire cleared, it seemed as if the chopper might have actually crash-landed. It had not been destroyed—not completely anyway. But it had picked a very inopportune spot to come down on.

That was when Tziz began whacking Ali on the back of his head.

“Don’t just stand there!” Tziz was screaming at him. “Go rescue those brave men!”

So now Ali was at the head of a small convoy of trucks filled with mechanics, racing towards the mountain, wondering what the hell he was going to do once he got there. The mountain’s face was absolutely sheer, and climbing up to the cliff would be nearly impossible without extensive climbing gear such as ropes and cinches—and maybe not even then.

But Ali was smart enough to know that he would have to give it a try.

So when he and his six trucks arrived at the base of the mountain, he had his men line up. He selected the two smallest, lightest men and told them to start climbing.

Then he radioed back to Major Tziz and told him he had the situation well in hand.

The two climbers got higher than Ali ever thought they would. It was at least eight hundred feet up to the cliff where the helicopter lay burning, and his men reached a point about two hundred feet high, simply by using every rock and handhold possible to them. Ali was heartened for a moment—maybe there actually was a way to scale the rock face. He briefly theorized how big this would make him look in Major’s Tziz’s eyes.