Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

The engineer quickly climbed up to the flight deck, and now both pilots were looking out at the strange chopper.

“Who the hell is this guy?” the copilot was yelling. His name was Pete Jones.

“Beats me,” the engineer replied. “But he skewered the comm set, he came up on us so fast.”

Jones turned to the man riding in the AC-130’s other control seat. This was Colonel Jeff Woods, the buzz-cut John Glenn lookalike.

“What’ll we do, Woodsie?” Jones asked him.

Woods looked out at the chopper and then settled back into his seat.

“Well, let’s see if you boys can shoot him down,” he said calmly.

It took about a minute and a half to power up the three miniguns again; they’d all been shut down at the completion of the attack on the hangar at El-Saad Men air base.

Now the flight engineer and the loadmaster struggled to push the right panels and flip the right switches and reboot the right computers. Somehow, ninety seconds later, the weapons systems all came on-line.

The strange chopper had cooperated in this endeavor by not for a moment diverting from its strange behavior. It was still riding off the left wing, still flying in a weirdly provocative manner.

The ArcLight’s makeshift gun crew was now facing an unusual situation. The orders from the flight deck said shoot the asshole down, so that was what they were going to try to do. But the miniguns were designed mainly to fuck up big targets on the ground. Hardened stuff, troops concentrations, general populations. Static stuff. Things that were standing still.

Shooting down another C-130 had taken some finesse. Could they really nail something relatively small and agile as a chopper?

They would soon find out….

It was just fate that Colonel Woods was riding in the copilot’s slot when all this happened.

He and Jones usually switched off and on for piloting missions. This particular day it had been Woods’s time at the stick, but after the attack on El-Saad Men was through, they had switched seats.

So for this curious engagement, Woods was relegated to observer status. Jones would have to try and keep the gunship steady while the two men in back fired on the mysterious helicopter. For this, the copilot’s seat had the worst vantage point. Woods couldn’t see the chopper, nor would he be able to see the guns when they went off. He really could do little else but sit back and just listen to what was going on.

That was why it was so strange then that he happened to glance out at the right wing and saw someone staring back in at him.

He nearly crapped his pants. It was another helicopter—another Hind. It was flying so close to the right side of the airplane, Woods could see the pilot looking in at him, not twenty-five feet away. The guy was handsome—almost like a movie star.

Woods tried to cough out a warning or something, but everyone else on the plane was concerned with the wacky chopper off their left wing, the side where the miniguns were located. So Wood just sat there for an instant or two, gaping at the second helicopter and wondering whether he was seeing things.

And in this odd stupor he saw the chopper get even closer. At the same time he watched as the chopper pilot opened the little side panel window on the Hind’s cockpit. Then he saw the pilot sticking something out of the window.

Then he saw a tremendous burst of light—it was a muzzle flash from a gigantic pistol.

The huge bullet shattered the AC-130’s right-side glass panel and struck Woods square on the temple. He felt the bullet enter his skull and explode his cranium outward. More shots were fired. The airplane’s control panel was suddenly coming apart. Then Woods looked down and saw blood falling in great splats on his lap, on his knees, and all over the steering column.

Then he saw nothing but red.

Then nothing but black…

Zim was reading a copy of The Wall Street Journal when Major Qank showed up with the bad news.

The doors to the great chamber opened, but in a grand lapse of protocol, Qank did not come in on his knees. In fact he strode in, very quickly, and walked right up to Zim’s mound of pillows. His teeth were clenched.

The Japanese girls saw his transgression and immediately scattered. They didn’t want be around when Zim realized one of his many rules had been so flagrantly broken.

Qank stared up at Zim for a few moments and then clapped his hands twice, very hard.

It was enough to cause Zim to lower the newspaper. Still, it took a few seconds for him to figure out what was happening. He stared down at Qank, a blank expression on his face.

“Yes? What is going on here, Major?” he asked, regaining his composure.

“Bad news, sir,” Qank said, quickly correcting himself: “I mean, possibly bad news.”

Zim was mystified. “What is it?”

Qank took a deep breath.

“Sir, we’ve lost radio contact with the gunship.”

Zim seemed even more perplexed. He folded the newspaper neatly on his lap.

“Has that ever happened before?” he asked.

Qank had to shake his head no. “They have always kept in touch, through either their passive or active radios,” he said. “But now all four lines are dead.”

Zim pulled his chin in thought, absentmindedly glancing at a story about Indonesian gas reserves.

“Do you think something might have happened to the airplane?” he asked. “Could it have crashed?”

Qank could only shrug. “Impossible to say, sir,” he replied.

Zim went right on talking: “Because if it crashed, well, that would—how do you say it?— queer the deal we want to make. The one-hundred-million-dollar sell-back? It would be queered ?”

Qank almost laughed at the vast understatement.

“I would say that is an accurate assumption, sir,” he replied.

Zim motioned for his two bodyguards to come forward. Qank did not notice the gesture.

“What do you suggest we do now then. Major?” he asked Qank.

Qank was prepared for this.

“I suggest we put all our security assets here on full alert, sir, until we re-establish radio contact with the gunship,” he said.

“Full alert?” Zim asked. “Here? Why?”

Qank began shuffling his feet a bit.

“Just a precaution, sir,” he replied. “The Americans have been unpredictable lately. You never know—they may even attack.”

Zim was surprised to hear this word.

“Attack? Here?” he said. “I thought that was impossible.”

Qank just shuffled his feet a little more. “Nothing is impossible sir.” he said. “And I might add—nothing lasts forever.”

Zim smiled a bit now. “That’s for sure,” he said.

He nodded to the guard who had silently placed a pistol at the back of Qank’s head. The man pulled the trigger and Qank’s throat exploded in a cloud of bone and red mist. The bodyguard then lowered the gun and put another bullet into the small of Qank’s back. This round went through his lungs and demolished his heart. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Zim leaned back in his pillow and picked up The Wall Street Journal again.

“Clean that up,” he ordered his guards. “And then prepare the compound for an attack. Whatever that means.”

Norton was the first one on the scene after the ArcLight gunship went down.

He found it on the edge of a huge onion field inside a shallow valley about fifty kilometers north of El-Saad Men air base. It had come to rest at the edge of the long, narrow farming area, its extended nose barely touching a small road that ran into a small village nearby. It was rather amazing: Somehow the plane had found the softest piece of ground in a thousand square miles on which to land.