Chapter Fifteen
The Pig was at the crest of a hill, so they commanded the high ground, but without cover it did them no good. Their forward momentum didn’t give Linc enough time to jam the transmission into reverse, so he took the only option open to him. As the rocket came at them on its unguided, flat trajectory, the former SEAL mashed the accelerator and charged down the slope. He pressed a button on the dash to activate the hydraulic suspension, lowering the vehicle’s center of gravity by pushing the wheels out well beyond the fenders.
Murph no longer had the ground clearance to engage the .30 caliber machine gun mounted under the front bumper, but Linc’s move had given the truck enough stability to race across the face of the dune without tipping. Linc hit another switch to lower the curtain of chains behind the rear tires to cover their tracks. At the speeds he was hitting, the heavy lengths of chain hurled up a dense cloud of billowing dust, something their FLIR could see through but which the grenadier’s NVGs could not.
The rocket–propelled grenade impacted the earth where the Pig had been seconds before, blasting a harmless fountain of dirt and debris into the air. Tracer fire began to knife out of the darkness, converging on the rampaging truck like fire hoses.
“Linda —” Linc started to say, but she cut him off.
“I’m on it.”
She opened the door to the rear cargo area and launched herself through feetfirst. She went immediately for the switch that opened the top hatch, and the instant it was opened she pushed the secondary machine gun up and onto its roof mounts. The hatch covers gave her protection from the sides, so she aimed for the gunmen firing at them straight ahead. The .30 caliber roared in her hands, and spent brass arced away from the breach in a shimmering blur. She poured rounds into one particularly dense area of fire. In the darkness, she couldn’t tell what was happening a hundred yards away, but the stream of tracers racing for the Pig withered away to nothing.
She swung the gun to counter Linc’s erratic driving, ravaging another foxhole. There must have been a grenadier with the men firing assault rifles because the position was blown apart by an explosion that sent shattered bodies high into the sky.
Another RPG blasted out of the night, but the aim was so far off that Linc could afford to ignore it. He pointed the Pig at a long mound of sand that was giving several attackers perfect cover. He went up its face at an angle, and when he reached the top he threw the heavy truck into a four–wheel drift so that when they reached the bottom on the far side Linda had the entire row of gunmen in her sight’s crosshairs. She walked her rounds up the defile, tearing apart the defensive positions in a fury of destruction.
“I’ve got a massive thermal image here,” Mark said, staring at his computer.
“Range?”
“Five hundred yards. It’s partially obscured by the topography, but there is something big out there, and it’s getting hotter.”
“Missiles,” Linc ordered.
Even bouncing over the rough ground, Mark didn’t miss a keystroke as he worked his computer. Hydraulically operated panels opened along the Pig’s sides just enough to reveal the blunt nose cones of four FGM–148 Javelin antitank missiles. Normally a shoulder–fired weapon, the Javelin carried a seventeen–pound warhead, and had proved capable of defeating any armored vehicle it had ever engaged.
The Javelin was an infrared–guided fire–and–forget weapon, so as soon as Mark locked his computer’s targeting reticle on the unknown heat signature, the missile was ready.
“Fire in the hole,” he shouted for Linda’s benefit, and launched the rocket.
It came out of its tube in a gush of hot exhaust and streaked across the desert. Linc turned the wheel so Linda could engage another machine–gun nest that was peppering the Pig’s flank with a steady barrage of fire. It seemed the only active enemy still willing to engage them.
The Javelin homed in on the heat source with single–minded determination, ignoring the battle raging around it and the futile attempts of a couple of men to shoot it down as it roared into a secret desert base. Fifty feet from its target, its seeker head suddenly lost the signal, though it picked up a cooler, and closer, contact. Still, it ignored the bait and maintained its original course.
What the missile didn’t know was that a fuel truck had passed between it and its target, the cooler thermal image being its engine. The rocket slammed into the tank just behind the cab. The driver died in an instant as the fuel–air mixture detonated in a blossoming fireball that seemed to lick the heavens. A cluster of nearby tents was torn to shreds by the blast, their guy ropes turned to ribbons, and the poles reduced to split wood. Cargo netting strung up from date palms to hide the compound from satellite photography flared like tinder. Pieces of metal blown from the truck scythed down the ground crew that had been working at the base, but the shrapnel did nothing to the machine the crew had been servicing.
In the towering flames of the destroyed truck, Linc, Mark, and Linda saw two things at the same time. One was that the drill truck belonging to the State Department team had been blown onto its side by the explosion and its undercarriage was aflame. The second was what the perimeter guards had been protecting.
Nestled in a sandbag bunker was a Russian–built Mi–24 helicopter gunship, perhaps the most feared battlefield chopper in history. The heat from its twin Isotov turbines spooling up was what Mark had detected on the FLIR. The rotors were a blur as the pilot readied the flying tank killer for takeoff.
“Holy crap!” Murph cried. “If he gets that thing off the ground, we’re toast.”
Even as he said it, the chopper, code–named Hind, hauled itself into the sky. The pilot rotated the helo on its axis while still partially covered by the walls of sandbags. Mounted under the nose of the Hind was a four–barreled Gatling gun, and when it cleared the top of the walls it erupted.
Linda just managed to duck through her hatch when the desert around the Pig came alive with hundreds of .50 caliber rounds. Bullets pounded into the armored windshield with enough force to star the glass, and if the onslaught continued for even a few seconds more the glass would disintegrate.
Linc dropped a gear and hit the gas, throwing a rooster tail of sand in their wake. The ground just to the left of the Pig exploded as a fresh barrage chased after them. Then came the rockets, a half dozen of them, launched off pods slung under the Hind’s stubby wings. It was like driving through a sandstorm. The unguided missiles tore into the hills all around them. Linc swerved as best he could, zigging and zagging between each impact, hoping to buy a few seconds more. One rocket hit the rear bumper, rocking the Pig on its suspension but doing little damage beyond mangling the hardened steel.
Linc looked over at Murph. “Ready?”
“Do it!”
Linc cranked the wheel and slammed the brakes with every ounce of his considerable strength. The Pig whipped around, sliding on the shifting sands, its wide stance keeping it from flipping. The instant the nose was pointed back toward the Hind, Mark unleashed a pair of Javelins, trusting their heat seekers to find the target because he couldn’t take the time to aim properly.
The Hind’s pilot lost his target in the swirling maelstrom of dust and held his fire for a moment so the wind would blow the dust away. It was from this impenetrable curtain that the two missiles emerged. The cryonic cooling system of one of them had failed to reach the proper temperature, so it couldn’t acquire the target against the still–warm desert floor. It augered into the ground and exploded well shy of the chopper.
Pointed nose–on at the incoming rockets, the Hind posed a small thermal cross section because its hull shielded the exhaust from its turbines. The pilot knew this and did nothing, hoping that playing possum could cause the missile to fly past. But the Javelin locked on anyway. To its computer brain, the four glowing tubes hanging below the helicopter’s chin were enticing enough to commit to attack.
The heat seeker sent minute corrections to the missile’s fins, aiming it straight for the still–hot barrels of the Hind’s Gatling gun. The pilot tried to pull up at the last second, so the Javelin missed the gun but impacted directly under the cockpit. The explosion tore the helicopter in half, its front section nearly disintegrating, while the hull and tail boom reared up from the force of the blast. Because the main rotor was still fully engaged, the chopper lost all stability and began to spin, smoke pouring from the blackened hole that had been the cockpit. When the chopper canted over almost ninety degrees, the blades lost lift, and the ten–ton Hind crashed to earth. Its aluminum rotors tore furrows into the ground until they blasted apart, sending shrapnel careening at near–supersonic speeds. So much grit was sucked into the Isotov turbines that they flared out and seized.
The chopper’s self–sealing fuel tanks had done their job. There were no secondary explosions, and the flames around the engines’ exhausts quickly starved for gas.
Mark blew out a long breath.
“Nice shooting, Tex,” Linc drawled. He then called back to Linda, “You okay back there?”
“I know what James Bond’s martini feels like.”
“Sorry about that.”
She poked her head back into the cabin. “You guys took down the Hind, so it was an observation, not a complaint. What is this place? Some sort of border station?”
“Probably,” Linc replied.
“Take us over to the Hind, will you?” Mark asked. He was studying the downed chopper through the FLIR.
“That isn’t such a good idea. We should clear out while the clearing’s good.”
“I don’t think this is a border station,” Murph said. “I need a closer look at the helo to be sure. Also, we have to do a sweep for any communications gear left intact. If there are survivors out here, the last thing we need is them calling in reinforcements.”
Linc dropped the transmission into gear and drove the quarter mile to the wreckage. The Pig wasn’t even stopped before Mark threw open his door. Like a primitive hunter approaching a dangerous prey that he wasn’t sure was dead, Mark crept closer to the downed Hind. Linda was back up in the hatch, watching the smoldering ruins of the camp over her machine gun’s iron sights.
“What are you looking for?” she asked without looking down from her perch.
“Not for,” Mark corrected. “At.”
“Okay, then, at.”
“The air intakes aren’t normal. They’re oversized. Also, the stubs of the rotor blades.”
“And?” Linc prompted from the Pig’s cab.
Mark turned to look at him. “This chopper’s modified for high–altitude operations. I bet if I checked the fuel lines for their turbines, they’ll be larger than normal, too. And this” — he slapped a hard–point mount under the gunship’s wing — “is the launch rail for an AA–7 Apex missile.”
“So?”
“The Apex isn’t part of the typical load–out for a Hind. These are ground–attack choppers. The Apex is designed for air–to–air combat, specifically for the MiG–23 Flogger.”
“How can you be so sure?” Linda asked.
“Weapons design is what I did before coming to the Corporation. I lived and breathed this stuff,” he replied. “You guys have put two and two together, right?”
“Air–to–air missile, high–altitude chopper” — Linc made a motion like he was balancing these two elements in his hands — “it isn’t exactly a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. They used this bird to shoot down the Secretary’s plane.”
Linda asked, “So is this place Libyan or some terrorist compound?”
“That’s the million–dollar question,” Mark replied, stepping back into the Pig. “Let’s check it out and see if we can come up with an answer.”
They drove into the confines of the desert base. The tents were little more than ash, and the fronds had burned off all the palm trees. Linc braked next to the body of one of the Hind’s mechanics, placing the Pig between the corpse and the open desert. Mark jumped down and turned the body over. In the wavering light of the nearby fires, he could see a chunk of metal, probably from the tank of the fuel truck, was embedded in the man’s chest. What Mark didn’t find were rank insignia on the uniform or any kind of identification in the man’s pockets, not even dog tags.
He checked several more corpses, never venturing far from the protection of the Pig. No one showed any rank or carried ID. He poked around the ruined tents, finding a satellite phone, which he pocketed, and a big radio transceiver, which had been destroyed by the blast, but nothing to indicate who these men were or whom they served.
“Well?” Linda asked when he clambered into the cab of the Pig and closed the door for the last time.
“This place is a complete cipher.” He raked his hand though his stringy hair in a gesture of frustration. “We know the how of the crash, but we still don’t know the who or the why.”
“I’m not worried,” Linc said as he started them away from the camp and toward the Tunisian border. “I bet the Chairman had those two questions pegged five minutes after landing in that other helo.”