Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

Jacobs just shrugged—the smell of scotch was strong around him.

“Well, it’s an easy question to answer,” he finally replied. “Certainly not worth the trip.”

Smitz raised his M-16 so it was nose-high to Jacob’s face.

“Talk,” he told Jacobs. “Educate me.”

Jacobs just shrugged again. “Sure, I knew what the gunship was doing was despicable—I knew it a year before I even made the arrangements to come here. Just like the guys flying the damn thing knew before they came here. But thousands of despicable things happen around the world every goddamn day. In deepest Africa. In China. On the subcontinent. Where the hell is the great USA then? They are nowhere near the situation. Not because they can’t do anything, but because they couldn’t be bothered. If the person that’s getting butchered is black or yellow, they certainly don’t care. And if he’s brown they might help out—but only if he happens to live in a country where the oil just oozes out of the ground.

“So where the fuck do you get off being so high-and-mighty, Smitty? Don’t wave that flag in my face, sonny boy. I served it for forty years.”

But Smitz was just shaking his head. He wasn’t buying any of this.

“You still think you’re so fucking clever,” he growled at Jacobs. “And even when you’re about to die—you’re trying the same old Spook games. What do you call it? Distraction? Disinformation? Whatever it is—it ain’t working. For one minute do you expect me to believe that just because a lot of immoral stuff happens around the world, it was OK for you to join in?”

He reached over and slapped Jacobs hard across the face.

“You’re scum!” Smitz screamed at him. “Because I can see right through you. You told me that day in the hospital room why you did this—I remember now. All this—faking your death, coming here, directing the gunship, and tipping everyone we were coming—it was all for one reason.”

He paused.

“Money…” The word dripped out of his mouth.

Jacobs began to say something, but couldn’t. Smitz was right—and he knew it.

“Fucking government,” Jacobs began mumbling. “Paying me a lousy eighty grand a year!”

Smitz slapped him again.

“Don’t you dare bitch to me about your shitty paycheck being justification for what you’ve done. You were greedy . That’s the bottom line here.”

Jacobs just looked up at him and smiled. “That’s the bottom line everywhere, Smitty.”

The next thing Smitz knew, Jacobs’s chest exploded in two bursts of blood. The old man looked down at his sudden wound and then at Smitz’s rifle, as if the shots had come from there.

But they hadn’t….

Then a third shot hit Jacobs in the neck. His throat began gurgling. Then a fourth and a fifth shot got him right in the heart. With these, he finally slumped over, dead.

Smitz spun around and saw Chou standing at the door.

“Jeesuz, man,” he screamed at the Marine officer. “We were supposed to take this guy back!”

Chou didn’t say a word. He just walked forward and pulled the rest of the covers off Jacobs to reveal an Uzi in the man’s right hand, his cold fingers still on the trigger. The way it was pointing, it would have blown off Smitz’s genitals and sawed his lower torso in half.

“Never go into a hostile environment alone,” Chou finally told him calmly. “That’s the number-one rule of special ops.”

By this time the Great Zim was nearing a state of complete panic.

He’d heard the first round of gunfire and when he couldn’t get hold of the Black Squad members in their barracks, he knew that catastrophe had struck.

Now he only had two bodyguards with him, and they were both looking very concerned. The Japanese girls had left long ago, fleeing to parts unknown. The lights were flickering inside the palace for the first time anyone could ever remember, which made things even worse. Zim was extremely afraid of the dark.

Yet even in this moment of calamity, Zim wanted to do something very strange: He wanted to climb up to the roof of his chamber, to see what was happening for himself.

It took much grunting and pushing, but somehow the two bodyguards managed to move him up the long staircase that led out to the top of the compound’s main building.

Up here, the view of the ongoing battle was intense.

There was a massive helicopter sitting just outside the gate leading to the inner compound. There were dead bodies all along the parapets and littering the outer courtyard. All four of the Rapier positions were aflame.

Zim looked down and saw the mysterious gunmen running through the building containing his precious cars—they were shooting everything to pieces. His house containing his vault of splendid art had already been dynamited. Nearly one third of his compound was on fire. Surely these soldiers would come for him next.

But then something very weird happened.

Just as it seemed the raiding soldiers would break into the main part of the palace itself, they began running back towards the waiting helicopter instead. And all the while, another huge helicopter was picking up even more of the raiders outside the main wall near the Hotel.

From all appearances, it looked like a very hasty retreat.

Zim was instantly delighted.

“See!” he began screaming to the guards. “They run at the sight of me!”

The guards shrank back a bit, but Zim seemed to have a point. They were the only two people with guns standing between the raiders and the Great Zim himself, and yet the soldiers did seem to be running away.

Why?

“Because they are afraid of me!” Zim was yelping.

It was hard to argue with him. The two huge helicopters were now taking off, their engines straining mightily as their pilots attempted to perform an almost true vertical ascent. Both helicopters finally did get off the ground, but just barely.

Zim was so excited with this turn of events, he actually began waving goodbye to the departing soldiers. The helicopters flew right over their heads, the guards cowering, again thinking someone was going to take a shot at them. But no one did. The pair of aircraft swung up and over the mountain and slowly moved away to the southwest.

Zim was beside himself now. He was absolutely astounded that he was still alive.

“Lose the battle, win the war!” he was yelling.

He turned back to his two guards.

“Together, the three of us will build another palace, bigger and better than this place. And for your loyalty, you two will be my four-star generals. What do you say to that?”

But the guards weren’t really listening to him anymore. They had detected something over the shrill tones of Zim’s boasts. It was a very low rumbling, so deep it seemed to be shaking the air itself.

And right away, they knew what it was.

“Up there!” one guard yelled. “See it?”

It came out of the dark sky as always, looking like some kind of monstrous bird, its engines droning, its ghostly, unmistakable camouflage visible even in the night, four huge guns sticking out of one side.

It was the AC-130 gunship. Coming home to roost.

The guards fled and Zim tried to, but it was tough to beat the speed of a bullet. The airplane went into a left-hand arc about a hundred feet above the palace and opened up with all four of its guns at once.

It was like a hailstorm of fire and metal as the awesome barrage tore into what remained of the compound. The Hotel was decimated first. Then the remains of the car hall, the art vault, the power station, and the waterworks.

The plane dipped its left wing even lower, and this served to focus its firepower. Like a massive ocean wave, the cascade of bullets walked through the front gate of the inner sanctum, over the minarets, through the thick walls themselves. The tracers looked like a solid sheet of flame as they hit the pale blue dome of Zim’s inner chamber. Everywhere was smoke, fire. The sound of things blowing up.