Jack Coughlin: Kill Zone

Middleton took a drink of fresh water and sloshed back toward the other end of the culvert.

“Stop!” Kyle Swanson reached out from the back of the truck and put a hand on Middleton’s shoulder. He was sitting up, wide awake. “Hear that?” The sniper leaped from the truck bed with Excalibur in his right hand. “Incoming Huey.”

Middleton had not heard anything at all, but now picked up the signature whomp-whomp of a Huey helicopter’s blades. “Probably just following the road to see if he can spot any signs.”

Kyle was already at the far end of the culvert, kneeling behind the bushes. “No, sir. He’s too low and has been flying straight for the last few minutes, not running a grid search or following the turns in the road or checking any intersections. That’s bad news.”

“So what? Maybe he’s just supposed to give us a ride to the pickup LZ.” Middleton regretted saying that the moment the words left his mouth, and Swanson ignored him. “Yeah. That was stupid.”

Victor Logan was leaning forward between the two men flying the Huey, calling out the GPS coordinates as the helicopter ran through the sky about a hundred feet above the deck. A strong wind whipped through the open side doors. He saw nothing moving down on the ground.

“Okay,” he said into his microphone when the coordinates were exact. “Cut your speed and start making wide circles to the left. Look sharp.” The clattering helicopter bent into a left turn as Logan made a final check of the controls he would use to fire the minigun pods mounted on each side of the chopper.

Relying on the GPS coordinates was helpful only to a point. Ten-digit coordinates were precise to within about a meter, but from an unsteady and moving airborne platform like the Huey, identifying that specific meter was virtually impossible. The most they could hope to pinpoint was a distance that would be about two football fields square. If they saw something, the chopper would have to stop, turn around, and go back to find the point where the crew might have spotted something suspicious. Lining up a shot was easy; finding the target was hard.

The terrain was flat and cut into rectangles of irrigated green fields, which told Logan there were a lot of ditches down there in which a Special Forces operator could hide. But Middleton was not an operator, was out of shape, and was injured. That should provide an edge that would allow Logan to find them.

“Hey, Logan,” called out the Russky co-pilot. “We’re here. Where are they? You sure you plugged in the right numbers?”

“Yeah, asshole, I’m sure I plugged in the right numbers. Just fly this crate and keep looking.” Where the fuck are you, Sniper?

After completing two wide circles, Logan decided to look into some of the bigger ditch lines. “There’s a culvert at about two o’clock. Let’s check it out.”

As soon as he heard the pitch change in the blades, Swanson called over his shoulder, “Get in the truck and start it up, General. We’re going to have to move fast.”

Middleton argued, “I can help you. I’ll spot for you. The two of us would put out more firepower.”

“No! Damn it! Get in the goddam truck! You’re just one more thing I have to think about!”

Swanson ducked deeper behind the brush hide. Stealth was his best weapon, being able to spot the enemy before being seen. The pitch of the rotor blades changed again, to a THUD-THUD-THUD sound that indicated that the helo was coming to a hover. If it was going to just hang up there, edging lower and lower, whoever was inside eventually would see the truck.

Kyle was feeling the hard downdraft as the blades pushed churning air against the ground and the ditch funneled the wind into the tunnel. He kept one hand on some of the bushes, but the others blew away, and he was partially exposed.

The helicopter was about thirty yards away from the mouth of the culvert, and about seventy yards in the air, in a hover and beginning a slow 360-degree spin to scan the entire area. The right side was toward him, and he saw the miniguns. If they open up with those, we ‘re cooked.

Swanson let go of the other bush and brought Excalibur to his shoulder as he leaned his left side against the concrete curve of the underpass to steady himself. The scope was at his eye by the time the canopy of the helicopter swung around to face him, the chopper spinning to its left. He saw the pilot in the left seat and the co-pilot on the right and someone else between them, probably to fire the machine guns.

“Look!” the Russian yelled over the radio and pointed his finger. “There they are!”

Victor Logan leaned forward a bit more and could see one man in a tunnel beneath the road. It was the sniper, and he already had his long rifle up and pointed at the helicopter. “Shit!” he said, reaching out to fire the miniguns, knowing it was too late.

Kyle waited to squeeze the trigger until the last possible moment in a contest of nerves, speed, and physics. The co-pilot was clear and large in Excalibur’s scope, which already had glowed with the blue firing stripe, but he wanted the armor-piercing.50-caliber bullet to do more than just take out one guy. When the angle was just right, he finished the shot.

The big bullet smashed through the Plexiglas canopy, caught the Russian under the chin, and tore off the back of his head. Then it continued upward through the roof of the helicopter and into the complex housing of gears and rods that controlled the rotors.

Kyle held the scope on the helo, jacked in another round, and fired again, punching out another chunk of the canopy. The bullet ricocheted through the control panel. He managed to fire a third round before the pilot was able to snatch the nose back around to the right and break away, trying to get out of the line of fire and gain some altitude. Kyle emptied the rest of the clip at the retreating, wobbling bird.

“I’m losing rotor control!” shouted the South African pilot as the helo coughed and the controls stiffened. A loud ripping noise came from overhead, where the rotor gears were grinding themselves apart, and fire broke out in the cockpit.

He wrestled with the aircraft, trying to push it from hover to full power and then bleed off speed for landing. The Huey wasn’t responding, and began tilting on its own.

“We’re going in!” he screamed, and covered his face with his arms.

Victor Logan, strapped into a harness that had allowed him free movement, was sprawled on his back. He grabbed the metal struts of seats along the back of the cabin, pushing his feet hard against the bulkhead separating the front compartment just as the helicopter smashed nose-first into a green and soggy field. He blacked out.

Swanson was running to the truck before the helicopter crashed 400 yards away. Middleton had cranked it, left it in neutral, opened the driver’s door, and slid across to the passenger side, where he buckled his seatbelt and pointed his Kalishnikov out the window.

The sniper piled in behind the wheel, pushed Excalibur over to the general, and tossed him a packet of ammo from his web gear. “Reload!”

Kyle jammed the truck into low gear and mashed the accelerator to the floor. The Toyota’s powerful engine roared, the truck skidded a bit in the muck of the culvert and then the big tires took hold, and they crashed out into the daylight, throwing up a wave of water on each side. A curtain of spray coated the windshield. Swanson saw the downed chopper, but that was no longer a threat, so he twisted the steering wheel violently to the right and the truck growled up the embankment and skidded onto the paved road.

“Where are we going?” yelled the general as he pushed five.50-caliber bullets into a magazine and loaded one more into the raceway.