Way of the Warrior (Troubleshooters #17.5)(85)

Even five miles out, the flash of the first strike was a clear streak across the infrared night-vision image projected on her helmet’s visor. The resulting explosion was small. The night’s mission brief had said to stop the convoy, gather intelligence, then destroy the munitions. So, first strike had been merely to stop the gun runners’ forward progress and get their attention.

The latter part definitely worked. Fire raked skyward, and not just little stuff. She could see anti-aircraft tracers arcing upward in a white-hot trail of glowing phosphors and hoped that no one was in the way.

“Stay sharp,” she warned herself and her crew. The fire show was a distraction for others to worry about. Their worry was—

“CSAR 4. Immediate extract. Grid 37,” Archie, the air mission commander, called in. He was back at their helibase a hundred miles into Pakistan, watching their world from an MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone circling another fifteen thousand feet above them.

She acknowledged and dove for the roadway. Grid 37 was right in the gut of the pass, so coming in high was just asking for trouble with the ongoing battle she could see still in progress. At five feet above Lataband Pass, she unleashed the five thousand horsepower of the twin GE turbine engines. Fifteen thousand pounds of Black Hawk helicopter flung itself toward the battle at two hundred miles an hour. Even with the twists and turns of the narrow gravel road winding between the steep peaks, they were just two minutes out.

These were always the fastest and the slowest two minutes of her life. At her present altitude and the narrow valley she was flying in, even a stray boulder was a life-threatening hazard. Constant adjustments were needed to crest every rise and take advantage of every little dip. This is what SOAR trained for: flying nap-of-the-Earth to come out of nowhere, in the dead of night, exactly on target and on time.

Yet every second that ticked by, someone lay on the battlefield fighting to stay alive long enough to be rescued. She drove the turbines another couple RPMs closer to yellow-line on the engine’s tachometers.

This time the faster feeling won out, and they were on the battlefield with a shocking abruptness. And battle was definitely the operative word. Her tactical display showed two Black Hawks and two of the vicious Little Birds dancing across the sky. But there had been three Little Bird helicopters when they left the airbase.

Grid 37.

Pull back on the cyclic control between her knees for a hard flare to dump speed; pull up on the collective along the left side of her seat to gain just enough altitude to keep her tail rotor out of the dirt as she slowed. She hammered them down less than a hundred feet from the crumpled remains of the Little Bird helicopter.

Everything was happening at once. Chuff and Hi-Gear were already laying down covering fire, their miniguns blazing with a dragon’s deep-throated roar. At three thousand rounds a minute, they scorched the earth anywhere they spotted a bad guy. Chuck and Noreen were already out at a dead sprint toward the crumpled chopper.

She debated pulling back aloft to offer them better cover, but the intensity of the overhead air battle told her if she went aloft, she’d have to move well out of the area to be of any use. Her people stood a better chance if she stayed on the ground.

So instead, she remained a sitting duck on the ground and intensely counted the seconds. A hundred-foot sprint, with heavy gear, but high adrenaline: ten seconds. If the injured weren’t trapped but perhaps delirious enough with pain to fight against rescue: thirty seconds to get them strapped down. A hundred-foot return carrying deadweight on a stretcher or slow-limping someone back to the chopper: twenty seconds more. If they were bloody lucky, they only had to survive one minute on the ground.

Rather than watch the medics, she watched the tactical displays. She was getting heavy cover from above. A technical appeared from nowhere around an outcrop: a Toyota pickup with a heavy-caliber machine gun mounted on the bed—serious nightmare vehicle. But Hi-Gear was on it, and in moments the truck was adding its own fireball plume to the light and confusion of the night.

“Ten,” one of the medics shouted.

Lois began counting down seconds and eased up on the collective until the chopper was dancing on the dirt in its eagerness to be aloft.

She ignored the bright sparks of bullets pinging off her forward windscreen, hoping nothing was a big enough caliber to punch through. Her audio-based threat detector filling her ears with muted squeals indicating only small-arms fire; the big stuff was still hunting the SOAR attackers overhead. The directional microphones translated each bullet’s trajectory into fire-return data, and her crew chiefs were pounding back on those positions.

At five seconds to go, a crowd came out of the roiling dust kicked up by her rotors.

She glanced over for just an instant and then returned her attention to tactical while her mind unraveled what she’d just seen. One medic carrying a man over his shoulder, dead-man style. The second medic pulled one end of a stretcher, the other end dragging on the road’s gravel surface with a body strapped to it; good, both of her crew accounted for. Two other guys limping in with their arms around each others’ shoulders, clearly nothing else keeping them upright.

The last two deserved a second glance. MICH helmets and HK416 rifles rather than the FN SCARs that all of SOAR carried across their chests. Delta Operators. If Delta were on the ground here, it meant this action was much heavier duty than she’d thought. That explained the unexpected scale of the firefight.

At zero on her countdown, she could feel the shift in her two-inch high hover as the team slammed aboard. She gave the stretcher bearer an extra three seconds to load.