Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

But together, the four of them had been able to cook up a way to get the weapons to fire semi-manually. In effect they had rigged a system whereby the guns would fire on a timed command—and that command could be sent by the pilot when he was able to get the plane into position above their next target.

In order to do this, though, they had been forced to erase a large portion of the weapon computer’s original firing commands, along with a ton of secondary and backup commands.

But what difference did that make?

As far as they were concerned, this would be the last time they would be operating the gunship.

At this time tomorrow, they would be gone—pockets full of money—to places unknown.

They just had to hit this one last target.

That target was now just five minutes away.

It was ironic that they had been vectored to this part of Iraq. Years before, the gunship had flown this sector many times looking for SCUDs or other targets of opportunity. As they flew over these familiar parts once again, it was almost as if the aircraft recognized its old turf. There were the Tajji Mountains over there. The Samarra dry river over there. The valley known as Tawiq Cha was over there. And out on the horizon, coming into range soon, was the air base, now abandoned, known as El-Saad Men.

The main hangar stuck out like a sore thumb. It was the only building standing in the ten-year-old rubble of the base, the only structure that could be identified so quickly from ten thousand feet.

Upon seeing it, the pilot lowered the gunship’s altitude to 3,500 feet in a hurry, putting the ArcLight into a dive so severe the other three crewmen had to hold on for dear life. But it was a jovial plunge—one last time on the Space Hog roller coaster.

Inside of sixty seconds, the airplane was in position over the hangar. There was even a large arrow painted on its rooftop. It couldn’t have made a better bull’s-eye.

“OK there’s your mark,” the pilot called back to his “rookie” gunners. “Let’s do a half-rotation, thirty-second burst with the minis. Then we’ll go around again and try the popgun.”

The three men in the rear weapons bay radioed ahead that they got the order. Now they had to see whether their jerry-rigged computer command would work. They felt the pilot dip the plane’s left wing. Looking out the window, they could at last see the hangar themselves.

“OK, let’s give it a shot,” one said.

The second man did a mock sign of the cross and hit a button—just one of many on the firing panels connected to the three-minigun setup. There was a slight delay—almost too long. But then an amber light blinked on, indicating the pilot had punched in his timed-sequence command.

Five seconds later, to their great surprise, the three miniguns opened up full force.

The noise was sudden and the vibration so intense, it nearly knocked all three men on their rears. But they were laughing at the same time.

“It worked!” two yelled at once. “The fucking guns worked!”

“What did we need those other nine assholes for all this time!” the third joked.

Meanwhile, the miniguns were doing their deadly task. It was strange, but the worst vantage point to see how the target was faring was from the back of the gun- ship itself—especially in the first few seconds of a sequence. But as the airplane began to move around its semicircle and the three streams of fire combined into one and formed an arc, the rookie gunners could see at last the storm of lead tearing up the hangar with routinely chilling efficiency.

At the end of the thirty-second fusillade, the pilot twisted the airplane level again and called back for an assessment. The gunners looked out and saw that half the hangar was literally blown away and the other half was on fire. “Must have been a secondary within,” one man yelled ahead to the cockpit.

The pilot laughed at this joke, and then brought the airplane down to 1500 feet.

“Let’s fire up the popgun,” he said, referring to the howitzer. “We’ll use up whatever shells are left in the chamber feed and then get the hell out of here.”

The gunners did as told. They hit a separate timed order for the howitzer, and soon it was firing away with its usual swooshing noise.

The streams of artillery shells made a longer arc than the miniguns. They exploded with great flare on impact, the result of their high-explosive warheads. It took but another twenty seconds—and 21 shells—to obliterate the rest of the hangar.

Then the pilot called back the cease-fire order. Then he straightened the airplane out again.

He looked out his side window and saw that where the huge hangar had stood just two minutes before, now was a raging fire encompassing a pile of rubble. Nothing inside, man or metal, could survive that, he knew.

Of course, he’d seen it all before.

“Good job, boys,” he called back to the firing cabin. “Let’s go home.”

There was a sense of gaiety inside the cockpit of the AC-130 gunship now.

The aircraft had settled in at 5,500 feet in altitude and had reached its cruising speed of two hundred knots. The heavy plane was much easier to handle now because of all the ammunition just expended. In fact, the ride home was always smoother—and satisfying too. After a successful mission, it was always a pleasant feeling to go home with an empty belly.

All this was something they might eventually miss, the four crewmen had mused earlier. After ten years, the old habits would be hard to break. But they had little to complain about. Eight years of living in luxury at Zim’s Hotel; another two fixing up and then flying the great gunship again. The money had been good. The food great; the booze better.

With just one day left, they only had one real regret. If only they had been able to score some women along the way…

But little did they know that this perverse tour of duty was coming to an end sooner than they thought.

The first indication that something was not right came from the crew’s flight engineer. He’d been relaxing at his station, feet up, eyes closed, fighting off sleep.

Suddenly the radio in front of him burst to life with a howl of static. It jolted the engineer back to reality. His radio panel was lighting up like a Christmas tree. Red lights, green lights, blue ones too. All of them blinking madly.

“What the fuck?”

Then came some shouting. The loadmaster was trying to yell something up to the flight deck. The engineer took his eyes off his equipment, looked down into the weapons bay, and saw his colleague at the side window pointing at something off their left wing.

A moment later the engineer heard the copilot swear.

“Jeesuz… What the fuck is… ?”

That was when the airplane started bucking; it was so bad at first, the engineer had to hold on. The plane straightened out a bit a few seconds later, but the engineer could detect a wave of tension suddenly crackling through the ship.

He unstrapped, made his way back to the weapons bay window, and finally saw what all the commotion was about.

It was a helicopter, riding no more than twenty-five feet off their left wing. It was pale brown and red, with a strange bubble nose and long tail section. It was a two-man aircraft, but only one person could be seen on board. It was painted in Iraqi markings, but the pilot was definitely not an Iraqi. He clearly had red hair and a Caucasian complexion. In fact, he looked like an old-time cowboy. What kind of helicopter was it? The engineer didn’t know one chopper from the other, but he believed this thing was a Russian-built Hind.

But what was it doing out there? It was so close to their wing, one wrong move and they would surely collide with it. And the way its pilot was flying seemed crazy. The chopper was all over the sky, going up and down, back and forth, flashing its nav lights wildly. The pilot himself was particularly animated. He was waving his arms, giving them the finger, and seemed to be shouting something at them. There was only one word describe his bizarre behavior: He was taunting them.