Without Fear

by Col. David Hunt

  “Still busy, sir. Had eyes on the plane for a moment and—There you are!”

  She spotted the heat signature again and immediately activated a Sidewinder, trying to get a lock. That was one of the advantages of the AIM-9X version of the venerable missile. When she used it in conjunction with her Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System, she could point the AIM-9X’s seeker and lock it by simply looking at the target, making her job easier, especially in her condition. Her shoulder continued to throb, especially when working the throttles, but it was her forehead that really bothered her, as the lining of her helmet pressed against her stitches.

  Gut up, she thought, as the range finder reported the target almost two thousand feet below her and four thousand downrange.

  But before she could release the Sidewinder, her missile warning system blared inside the cabin. Someone had achieved missile lock on her.

  “What the—”

  The side of the mountain lit up, and she reacted by throwing the Warthog into a tight right turn while pushing the throttles forward.

  “Missiles!” she shouted. “Someone’s firing missiles at me!”

  * * *

  Bin Laden led the group of men on the clearing overlooking the pass, aiming the launcher at the incoming jet, which was barely visible in the night sky.

  He positioned the target in the center of the sight assembly range ring, trying to get the missile’s heat-seeking head to lock on to the hot exhaust plumes of the large engines in the rear of what he recognized as an A-10.

  The cold night and the lack of any other heat source gave the seeker the upper hand. It responded with the acquisition tone, a steady, high-pitched sound signaling missile lock.

  Bin Laden pressed the Uncaging switch before squeezing the trigger, momentarily blinded by the blaze as the missile shot out of the launcher, leaving behind a yellow contrail as it streaked across the sky.

  A moment later, two of his men also released their missiles.

  * * *

  The g-forces tore at her as Vaccaro cut hard right in full afterburners, losing sight of the narrow pass or the plane getting away, her senses focused on the three pulsating lights rapidly closing in.

  She worked the SUU-42A/A countermeasures system, dispensing a combination of flares and infrared decoys, before dropping the nose and turning in the opposite direction, trying to increase the distance between her and the—

  Two missiles went for the hot lures dropping behind the Warthog, detonating their high-explosive annular blast fragmentation warheads less than five hundred feet away.

  The A-10C shook from the combined shock waves, followed by the sound of dozens of sizzling fragments, like red-hot hail, thrashing her armored skin.

  She jerked her head back when a flaming fragment pounded the armor-glass, breaking up into dozens of smaller pieces. Like a burst of smoldering ash, the pieces vanished in her slipstream, leaving behind a dark, grazed spot the size of her fist on the canopy.

  Two down. One to go, she thought, working through the pain in her shoulder and forehead while giving her instrument panel a quick glance, verifying no damage, before releasing more flares.

  The countermeasures ejected from their underside pod stained the sky in bright crimson as she leveled out less than fifty feet over the forested mountain, cutting back power while turning hard left at almost three hundred knots to position the Warthog at a ninety-degree angle relative to the incoming missile.

  G-forces slammed her into the seat, and the titanium frame screeched from the stress—as did her wounds. The A-10C’s wings trembled as she pushed her plane, and her body, to their limits.

  “Red One One, Bravo Niner Six. SitRep.”

  Seriously?

  She couldn’t reply even if she wanted to, not while the g-meter read 7.8 and her head felt as if it would burst at any moment. But she still managed to complete the turn, leveling the wings and pushing full throttle again, accelerating to 330 knots while searching left, then right, trying to locate the incoming—

  The blast lit up the sky just above and to her right, where she had released the last load of flares, and the shock wave pushed the Warthog down into the trees.

  Shit!

  For a second, the belly of the plane sank into the upper branches as glowing shrapnel rained on her like molten lava, bouncing off the armored canopy while the airframe trembled, the control column almost slipping from her grip.

  Airspeed plummeted from the sudden friction as branches tore into her undercarriage munitions.

  She pulled back on the column while the afterburners torched the forest in her wake. The control panel lit up, signaling failures in multiple weapons systems, from Hydra rockets to her Sidewinders and MK77 incendiary bombs. Her port engine was also overheating.

  But she had more immediate problems. Clutching the control column with both hands now, she pulled as hard as she had ever pulled, ignoring her shoulder while slowly inching the A-10C from the forest’s deadly grip.

  Her eyes glanced at the airspeed.

  230 knots.

  If it reached 120 knots, the Warthog would stall and sink in the sea of stone pines while she still had over half her fuel, triggering an inferno.

  Never stop fighting, Red One One. Never.

  She needed an edge, something to cut the friction.

  And it came to her an instant later, as airspeed dropped to 210 knots.

  She pulled the trigger on the Avenger 30mm gun, which came alive with a thundering blaze of depleted uranium hell, carving a wide track in the canopy directly in front of her—and producing a twenty-knot decrease in forward airspeed.

  But she persisted, praying that the reduced friction created by the rotary canon mowing down the forest ahead of her would offset the increased counterforce of the 30 × 173mm rounds, each nearly a pound in weight, fired at the rate of 4,200 rounds per minute. The tops of pines in her path vanished in a blur of mulch and green debris, ripping away the mountain’s hold, allowing her to spring skyward.

  Airspeed shot back up, but not all the way to cruise speed. Her port engine continued to overheat and she had to throttle it back, using opposing rudder and aileron to counter the asymmetrical thrust.

  She was free, accelerating once more in the night sky while searching for the runaway craft, but her FLIR camera was malfunctioning, unable to produce any heat images, likely damaged along with most of her underside systems.

  Dammit.

  Switching on the night vision optics in her helmet turned the darkness into shades of green. But like the team on the ground, who had been unable to see the plane at the bottom of the gorge, she was now blind, incapable of discerning anything deeper than a few hundred feet.

  Unless …

  As she considered the thought, KAF came back on.

  “Red One One, Bravo Niner Six. SitRep.”

  Vaccaro shook her head, not at the controller but at the maneuver she might have to do in order to have a chance at catching the fugitive plane.

  “I’m running out of options, boys,” she replied. “Dodged three missiles and nearly bought the farm. All weapons systems down except for the Avenger. Where is the cavalry?”

  “On its way, Red One One. Ten minutes out. Hang in there. Try to keep eyes on the target.”

  “Roger that. Will—”

  Another flash down by the edge of the pass.

  Realizing she could not continue to play the enemy’s game, Vaccaro used the only card she had left. Pumping the last of her flares, which she was thankful to see were getting dispensed in a red-hot stream arcing away from her flight path, she pushed both engines into full afterburners while dropping the nose and banking the plane, sinking into the chasm while topping 340 knots, just a dash below her maximum speed.

  She was going way too fast and also stressing her port engine. But survival depended on proper spacing from the flares.

  The blast came once again, from somewhere above and behind her, powerful, reverberating, splashing the canyon with yellow light.
Shrapnel tore into her bird, the airframe once again trembling as the armored skin absorbed the detonation. More alarms blared inside her cockpit, more systems malfunctioning.

  But her primary enemy now was her speed.

  She needed to slow down fast or risk crashing inside the pass.

  Deploying the air brakes while cutting back the throttles pushed her into her restraining harness, her shoulder stinging from the pressure.

  Damn.

  Mustering control, she swung the stick to the left and pressed hard on the left rudder pedal, shoveling the Warthog into a wickedly tight turn to clear the next twist in the winding canyon, her head pounding from the g-forces.

  Airspeed dropped to 210 knots. 190 knots. 170 knots.

  She adjusted the throttles to hold 160 knots, flying with flaps at ten degrees while diving almost to the bottom of the ravine, leveling off a couple hundred feet from the dry riverbed.

  Her eyes scanned ahead now while she managed her speed, turn after turn, as walls of black granite and snowy trees blended into a green-washed corridor.

  She had to constantly adjust, constantly compensate for the port engine, which she now kept at idle, letting it cool while she relied on the starboard turbofan to keep her in business.

  And that’s when she spotted the rogue plane, disappearing around the next turn, a few hundred feet ahead and just below her, its green silhouette clear against the canyon wall.

  It’s a Caravan!

  “Bravo Niner Six, Red One One. Be advised target is a Cessna Caravan. Repeat. A Cessna Caravan.”

  No response.

  What the hell?

  She repeated the message and again got no response, which made her think that her comm radios were among the growing list of malfunctioning systems.

  Adjusting power to avoid overshooting the Cessna, she slowed down to 150 knots. Doing so placed her dangerously close to her stall speed of 120 knots, but now she had a clear shot with the Avenger.

  However, the Caravan turned again, momentarily disappearing from sight. She followed, only to realize that the turn led into a narrower pass. The Cessna had already gone into a slip, wings banked forty degrees with opposing rudder.

  Since she had roughly the same wingspan as the Caravan, Vaccaro copied the maneuver, narrowing her profile, squeezing through the constraining walls until they opened up again after the next turn.

  She leveled her wings at almost the same time as the Cessna, whose pilot seemed unaware of her presence. At a distance of just three hundred feet, she squeezed the trigger.

  And nothing.

  Not a damn thing.

  Dammit, she thought, glancing at her systems, noticing the red warning light on the Avenger cannon, and also noticing her fuel gauge at 30 percent.

  She didn’t have enough fuel to get back to—

  Gunfire erupted from the bottom of the gorge, the muzzle flashes pulsating in rhythm with the hammer-like blows to the Warthog’s underside—the Taliban covering the Caravan’s escape route.

  Bastards are everywhere, she thought, while trying to diagnose the Avenger malfunction—and also while managing the constant turns, controlling airspeed, and offsetting the asymmetric thrust due to her overheating port engine.

  She muscled her way through the volleys pounding her bird, trusting the Warthog’s armored skin, and glanced at the GPS screen. It highlighted the canyon, which was splitting into dozens of fingers as it approached the desert in another fifteen miles, meaning the Cessna could take any one of them, disappearing in the sand dunes. And given the level of resistance she had witnessed inside this canyon, she didn’t want to think about what awaited her in the open.

  She had to act, and act now.

  143

  At Gunpoint

  QUAI KOTAL. SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

  “Bastards are shooting at her!” Wright shouted. He was hanging on to an overhead pipe on the forward cabin of the Black Hawk helicopter that had plucked them off the edge of the precipice a minute ago, before it hauled ass down the pass, using the FLIR camera to locate the two planes.

  The Warthog cruised right over enemy positions deployed along the bottom of the ravine while rapidly approaching the runaway Cessna.

  “Why isn’t she using the cannon? She’s close enough!” Stark shouted over the rotor noise. He was standing next to Wright, between the pilot and the copilot, staring at the large center display slaved to the infrared camera.

  To Stark’s dismay, this was the same helicopter that had rescued Kira—who had forced the pilot at gunpoint to head this way after hearing of the runaway plane.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he had screamed, when he boarded the Black Hawk and saw her standing by the pilot, holding a shiny Tokarev to his helmeted head while Sergei and the other Spetsnaz operative covered her with their AK-9s.

  “It is my bomb, yes?” she had replied, her shoulder now properly bandaged, a fire burning in her hazel eyes.

  “This might work in Russia, Kira! But you can’t go around hijacking American military helos!”

  “He would not do it otherwise,” she had replied.

  “Bitch is nuts!” the pilot, a Lieutenant Gonzales, had screamed, giving her the bird.

  “See?” she had added, waving the gun. “The only way.”

  Stark had talked her into putting the gun away and then had convinced Gonzales to go in pursuit.

  “Just keep those crazy fucking Russians away from me!” Gonzales had shouted, waiting for Stark to dispatch them to the rear before he would accelerate in the direction of the A-10C.

  They had tried to respond to Vaccaro’s message, which had identified the rogue plane as a Cessna Caravan, but apparently the air force captain could not hear them.

  Stark stared at the infrared image, which showed the Warthog closing in on the seemingly unsuspecting Cessna—until the Warthog rammed its nose into the smaller plane’s empennage.

  “She didn’t just do that!” Wright screamed. “Get me down there!” he shouted to Gonzales.

  “Too tight, sir!”

  “I don’t care! Get me down there!”

  “Can’t do, sir!”

  “Son,” he insisted, “the battle is down there! Not up here.”

  “I get it, sir, but—”

  Stark pulled out his SIG P220 and pointed it at the pilot.

  “You too, cabron? Seriously?” Gonzales shouted, while Kira looked up from the main cabin and started laughing.

  Stark ignored her, his attention on the young pilot. “Very serious, son. That plane’s flying away with a nuke. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it out of my sight.”

  “Shoot me if you must, sir, but I am not risking everybody’s lives! The opening is too narrow for the rotor!”

  Stark frowned and looked past the very amused Kira, arms crossed, telling her guys something he could not hear. He spotted Larsen and Martin in the rear of the cabin, looking bored, sitting across from Ryan, Monica, and Hagen, who somehow had managed to fall asleep in the middle of all this.

  “Danny! Get your ass over here!” Then, turning back to Gonzales, he added, “You are relieved, son!”

  “Seriously, sir?” Gonzales asked, as Martin reached the cockpit.

  “Very! This guy’s the best stick in the armed forces. Plus this is on me!”

  Gonzales motioned his copilot to head to the back while he swapped seats to yield the left stick to Martin.

  “You better know what the hell you’re doing,” Gonzales shouted at Stark, as Martin strapped himself into the right seat.

  Martin just grinned while settling behind the controls, left hand on the collective lever, right on the cyclic, touching the tips of his boots to the rudder pedals.

  144

  Knock Knock

  QUAI KOTAL. SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

  The A-10C’s nose crashed into the Cessna’s rudder with enough force to rip through the relatively softer aluminum skin, tearing off the top third. De
bris flew into her armored canopy like shrapnel, grazing it before washing away in her slipstream.

  “Knock knock, assholes,” Vaccaro said inside her oxygen mask, keeping an eye on her airspeed, which had dropped to 140 knots.

  The planes separated on impact, and the Cessna wavered while accelerating.

  * * *

  “What the hell was that?” Zahra screamed, slamming into her seat belt. “Did we hit a wall?”

  “Not a wall,” he replied, advancing the throttle, reaching 180 knots while pulling up his flaps.

  “Then what?”

  “Company,” Mani replied, testing his control surfaces. The rudder was a little sticky, but functional, and so were the elevators as he dropped almost to the bottom of the ravine and slipped the plane into the next turn. “We have company.”

  “What are you talking—”

  “Back there,” he said. “Someone just rammed us.”

  * * *

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Vaccaro mumbled, advancing both throttles to catch up to the Cessna, reaching 180 knots, pushing not just the overheating port turbofan but also the airframe as she swung the stick to the right to negotiate a sharp turn.

  The g-forces piled up on her as she banked the A-10C nearly onto its side, the pressure crushing her wounded shoulder, making it difficult to breathe. The pain was overwhelming.

  Jesus!

  But she kept control of the center stick, emerging into another straightaway. Leveling the wings while once more closing in on the Cessna, she noticed that her target kept changing altitude, bobbing up and down in the pass as the walls rushed past at a sickening speed.

  She kept her cool, working through the pain, eyes straight ahead, making adjustments, working the elevator, rudder, and ailerons along with power settings to track her target like a missile, closing in very fast. She shoved the throttles into full afterburners just before ramming the Cessna again. The crash was overarching. Her harness dug into her flight suit, squeezing the wind out of her, and she felt the force ripping into the staples on her shoulder.

  The Warthog trembled, her control column quavering as more alarms blared in her cockpit. The A-10C’s nose crashed into the Cessna’s tail section, tearing through it and into the main fuselage, white aluminum skin covering her canopy.