Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

“Does this mean you’ve lost your death wish?” Eddie teased. “Last time we flew together you had me land at ground zero of a nuclear explosion with about two minutes to go.”

Mercer laughed. “Government cutbacks have slashed my danger pay to below minimum wage again. I only raid liquor cabinets unless given a direct presidential order. Which reminds me, I could really go for a… What the hell?”

A flash of light, like a laser beam, streaked up from the dark ground so quickly it appeared as a solid line rather than a moving object. It intercepted the lead Huey, the two coming together in a violent blast, the helicopter outlined briefly in the fire of its destruction. In an instant, the chopper was falling to the earth in a flaming ruin. The pilot of the second Huey had just started evasive action when a second SA-7 Grail missile rocketed skyward on a brilliant cone of expended solid fuel.

Known by NATO forces to be wholly inaccurate and under-armed with just six pounds of high explosive in its warhead, the Grail was still deadly against low-flying helicopters, especially those with exposed exhaust ports like the UH-1. The Grail fired at the Huey didn’t have the upgraded cryo-cooling unit to aid its infrared sensors at finding hot signatures, yet it still had no trouble locking onto its target against the cold background of the Alaskan night. The second Huey disintegrated.

Mercer was just recognizing the attack for what it was when Eddie Rice banked the JetRanger, applying max power to the turbines and the rotors, eking out every bit of speed as he tried to get them out of range of the shoulder-fired missiles. Debris from the first two choppers fell to the earth like meteor showers, the hulls hitting in explosive wrecks, fuel and metal and bits of their crews thrown up in fountains of flame and shrapnel. Patches of forest around the crash sites were ignited by the burning choppers, pine trees flaring like matchsticks. It would take hours for the rain to douse such a fuel-rich fire.

“Watch for those missiles!” Eddie shouted, jerking the controls first one way then the next in an attempt to foul the aim of the terrorists below them. The JetRanger, designed more for comfort than agility, groaned at Eddie’s flying, the bulkheads and structural members straining well beyond their design specifications.

“I’ve got a launch, starboard side,” Mercer called out, watching with morbid fascination as another missile lifted from the black forest.

“Got it.” Eddie hauled the JetRanger onto its side, tightening his turn so quickly that the helicopter lost nearly a thousand feet in just a few seconds.

The Grail passed behind them, its infrared sight unable to lock onto the exhaust ports of their chopper. Its rocket motor ran out of fuel and toppled the missile back to earth. During the violent maneuver, no one saw another Grail hurtle into the air.

It was almost directly ahead of them, its guidance system seeking them out with single-minded resolution. At last finding the heat signature it had been hunting for, the fifty-three-inch-long missile slightly altered its attack vector, shallowing its approach so as to come up under the Bell helicopter.

“Oh, God!” Mike Collins shouted, while the young soldier in the copilot’s seat screamed and screamed.

Mercer let himself go limp. The fear that had squeezed his chest when the first two helicopters were hit released him at this last moment so he could face his death calmly, watching it happen with almost clinical dispassion.

Of them all, only Eddie Rice hadn’t given up. The moment before the warhead struck the underside of the JetRanger, he again jerked the craft hard over, presenting the now tilted bottom of the chopper to the missile. It struck a glancing blow where the secondary rotor boom attached to the fuselage, and exploded.

Most of the blast was directed away from the helicopter because of Eddie’s quick thinking and exceptional reflexes, yet the JetRanger was mortally wounded. Smoke filled the cabin even as the chopper was thrown violently through the air, turned almost completely upside down by the explosion. The electrical system failed and a second later the turbine skipped, caught briefly, then began faltering as it starved for the fuel gushing from the severed lines. The raw stench of avgas gagged the four men as they struggled to regain proper seating in the bucking aircraft. Mercifully, it hadn’t ignited. Yet.

Relying on instinct alone, Eddie managed to get the JetRanger onto an even keel; the smoke was so thick that he couldn’t see the instrument panel only feet from him. They had started to auto rotate as they fell to the ground, the chopper spinning on its own axis in a tightening circle, pressing the men outward against the fuselage. Eddie used this to his advantage, slowing the descent by using what little lift remained in the still-spinning main rotor.

“I can’t see,” he shouted above the jarring noise of the fragmenting helicopter.

Mercer leaned forward, groping blindly through the smoke until his hands felt the cold metal of the Heckler and Koch MP- 5 submachine gun the sergeant had lost when the chopper was hit. Straightening, he cocked the weapon. “Cover your face!”

Aiming over Eddie’s shoulder, he loosed a hail of bullets against the windscreen.

The Plexiglas starred, then lost all integrity, flying into space in nearly one whole chunk. A few fragments whipped into the cockpit, one dagger-size shard burying itself in the shoulder of an unconscious Mike Collins. The swirling torrent of wind sucked the smoke out of the cabin, taking with it the paralyzing smell of avgas. Once again Eddie could see, his hands taking tighter control of the spiraling aircraft.

“We ain’t gonna make it,” Eddie yelled over the din.

A thousand feet below, the ground was a featureless, dark abyss, the starless night revealing nothing. They couldn’t tell if there were rocky mountains or a soft field or water below them. Eddie would have to try to make the landing blind, not even able to rely on the altimeter to get a fix on their position. It had frozen when they were hit.

“There!” Mercer shouted, pointing to their left.

Out of the gloom came a stand of tall, straight spruce trees, their high pyramidal tops like medieval church spires. The grove appeared tightly packed and would soften the controlled crash of the falling helicopter. Eddie banked toward the site, the engine coughing as the remaining fuel was burned up at a prodigious rate.

“It ain’t happening, man. It looks close, but it’s at least half a mile away,” Eddie shouted. Rain soaked them all. The soldier used a sleeve of his BDUs to wipe the water from Eddie’s dark face because the pilot couldn’t afford to take his hands from the controls for even a second. Suddenly Eddie was struck with an idea. “Both of you, your doors have emergency release pins on the hinges. Pull them and let the doors drop away.”

Mercer and the sergeant did what Eddie asked, tugging at the large red handles and kicking the doors outward. More rain surged through the cabin, wild eddies swirling in all directions at once. The wind reached a banshee pitch.

“I can hold it for only a second, and the drop is still gonna be about twenty feet to the tops of the trees, but it’s the best I can do.”

“No way, Eddie,” Mercer shouted. “I’m not leaving you and Collins.”

“Mercer, either we all die in the crash or just maybe I can save the two of you. Don’t take that chance from me, goddamn it.”

Mercer didn’t argue with Eddie’s dying wish. Bracing himself near the open doorway, his clothes rippling and snapping around him, he watched as Eddie brought them to the edge of the forest, just above treetop level. Echoes of the beating rotors kicked back from the hard earth below. On closer inspection, the evergreens were not nearly as dense as he’d first thought. There were huge gaps between many of the trees, and a straight fall from this height would split a man like a dropped sack of cement. He held the MP-5, waiting for Eddie’s signal, one hand clutching the empty door frame as the wind tried to suck him into the void.