by John Gardner
It was as he was looking at this particular marker that Bond thought he heard a distant roll of thunder. The sky was clear, and he looked around, then at Fliss. ‘Thunder?’ he asked, realizing as he said it that this was a different kind of thunder. The sound roared, clattered and pulsed making the ground shake underfoot.
Then he saw them: three dark grey shapes coming in over the trees. He also knew them for what they were. Relics of the Cold War: a little AH-1W Cobra, so low that you could see the TOW missiles, flanked by a pair of former Soviet Mil Mi-8s – ‘Hip Fs’ as they had been coded.
‘I rather think the general has arrived.’ Fliss pushed back her jacket, revealing a large holster which contained a small but lethal Tec-8 machine-gun.
‘How does a nice girl like you get into this business?’ Bond grinned as she unholstered the nasty little weapon.
‘If you’re carrying, I’d suggest you put a gun in your hand and make for that treeline.’ She was all business now. ‘General Brutus B Clay has been known to shoot first and ask questions later: and that’s only if he takes a dislike to your face. Know what the B stands for?’
‘Tell me.’ Borowning and ey
12
THE HIGH ROAD
Back!’ Bond whispered. ‘Crawl back towards the choppers.’ Behind them, the general was still shouting, raving, telling his men to blast Bond out. As they began to crawl, on hands and knees, through the trees, shrubs and bracken, a fusillade of shots went down behind them. Clay’s men were aiming very low and they could hear the bullets thumping into the trees and ground a few feet to their rear.
The reason for the low shooting became obvious as they reached the edge of the trees. In a comparatively small space directly behind the treeline the three helicopters were ranged in arrow formation, their rotors slowly turning at idle. Clay was obviously using the Cobra gunship as his personal aircraft, painted in a flat matt black with the weapons pods on the stubby wings fully loaded. It stood some twenty feet from where they crouched.
The Cobra had two cockpits, one – the pilot’s – mounted above the other, which was the gunner’s position. The pilot’s cockpit was empty, but looking at the forward gunner’s position, a figure was visible, slumped, head down, hanging on the straps of the safety harness. There was no doubt in Bond’s mind: from this close he did not need to see the face, but it was unmistakably M.
He could not tell if his old chief was alive or dead, and he glanced towards Fliss, trying to calculate if she would be able to squeeze into the gunner’s position and crouch down with M. Even if she could, it would be a bumpy ride.
The two Russian-made choppers behind, and to the left and right of the Cobra, looked ungainly, somewhat sinister, monsters with their twin rotors, a capacity for twenty-four passengers, and clam-shell doors at the rear which enabled light vehicles to be driven on board. Their fat, clumsy bodies packed a devastating firepower.
He dug back into his fading memory of Russian aircraft of the Cold War and recalled that the ‘Hip-F’ had an odd cockpit configuration. The view was excellent and covered a full 180°, but the instrumentation was laid out so that the captain of the big helicopter was seated in the right seat, not the more usual left. He lifted his head, peering to both left and right of the Cobra. A pilot sat in the right seat of each of the two ‘Hip-Fs,’ but because of the triangular p young womanEeither attern in which they had landed, Bond could see that if they ran from the treeline directly to the front of the Cobra they would not be visible to the ‘Hip-F’ pilots. If Fliss could get into the gunner’s position, they would still be able to move the canopy. The pilot’s canopy was already open so Bond would be visible only for a very short time, climbing up and getting into the cockpit.
There was, of course, an unknown factor: were the two ‘Hip-Fs’ still carrying troops on board? Clay had half a dozen with him in the graveyard, and the bigger helicopters had a combined capacity of forty-eight. Would the general keep these people sitting in the helicopters? He doubted it. If the general was that good, he would have had every man out and in a defensive ring around the three aircraft.
As he scanned the ground to his front, it crossed Bond’s mind that the chopper pilots had to be very skilled in order to bring the craft in to land in this tight space, for they were between the treeline and a sheer rockface. They were all trapped in the middle of mountains anyway. The eventual take-off would have to be fast and straight up in a hover; after that there would be plenty of cover, playing hide-and-seek among the jagged peaks, crevasses and valleys.
Another fusillade of bullets came down nearby. Clay and his six hotshots were moving in, so Bond quietly began to tell Fliss what they were going to do.
Her eyes opened wide. ‘You can fly one of those?’
‘I’ve flown SeaKings. Can’t be much different.’
He scanned the ground in front of them, whispering again to Fliss so that she knew exactly what action to take if the general and his party came bursting through this side of trees.
‘Okay. Ready?’ He looked at her and saw her curt nod.
Drawing his automatic pistol, crouching low and moving very fast, Bond led her out to the Cobra.
The forward gunner’s canopy exterior release slid back easily. Nobody had spotted them yet, though he kept looking back anxiously towards the line of trees. Clay and his men were obviously advancing through the dense wall of greenery, firing regularly at around 45° into the ground ahead as they drew closer to the strip of ground which harboured the helicopters.
‘He’s alive. Just unconscious. Normal pulse.’ Fliss had leaned into the forward cockpit to monitor M.
‘Can you get in?’
‘It’s going to be tight.’ She already had one leg over the fuselage and was trying to get low, between M’s legs. ‘I think I’ll just about fit.’ The other leg went over and she squirmed her body down onto the floor. ‘Okay.’
‘You’ll have to hang on. It’s going to be one hell of a bumpy ride.’
‘Just get us out of here, James. Good luck.’
He nodded and slowly made his way up to the main cockpit, keeping close in to the fuselage. His most vulnerable moment would be getting into the machine for at that point the pilot in the ‘Hip’ to his right and behind him would be able to see him.
He took a deep breath and rapidly leaped up to the metal rung just below the cockpit, keeping his eyes focused on the ‘Hip’ which now came into view, and breathing a sigh of relief because he could clearly see the pilot in the right-hand seat, but the man was bent, with his head down looking at something low in his cockpit.
Bond hoisted himself over the side and dropped into the bucket-like seat, very aware now of the slowly moving rotors above him. He grabbed at the harness and buckled it on">‘Something like that.riIQ while scanning the instruments, switching the weapons control so that all missiles and the twin heavy M197 machine-guns which sprouted from the nose beneath the forward cockpit could be fired by the pilot. He also located the switch which turned on the missile sights in his windshield. The Cobra had gone through many alterations and changes since it had first appeared as the Bell Model 209 during the Vietnam war. Now, he thanked the designers for their foresight in allowing the pilot full control of the weapons in the event of the gunner being taken out.
His next moves had to be done in a fast and ordered sequence, for he had to get the craft off the ground in a matter of seconds, before either the group of men in the treeline, or the pilots of the ‘Hips’ had time to react.
He pushed forward the collective control, hearing the slight whine above him as the long two-blade rotor angled itself into a position for maximum lift. Then, in one series of movements, he grabbed the cyclic stick, eased the throttle forward and felt the machine respond, rising a shade faster than he had reckoned, as he jinked the Cobra to the left, grabbing for the canopy control so that it came down almost silently, closing off the outside air.
He kept the nose down as he rose over the trees, moving left and c
limbing away. There was an ominous thump, followed by two or three similar noises, and he realized that Clay’s men were firing at him, running towards the two ’Hips’. He even glimpsed Clay’s face as the general lifted his arms and tried to blast away with what looked like a large .45 automatic.
He jinked the chopper in the other direction, still climbing, but coming dangerously close to the top of the trees. Then he was free and away, though he guessed not for long. In every direction he saw rock, stone and mountain: a whole landscape of peaks and troughs, some of the peaks still bearing traces of snow from the previous winter.
Grabbing at the headset which he had knocked off the seat in his rush to get in, he jammed it around his ears, adjusting it as he climbed towards the nearest series of brutal, belligerent and threatening pinnacles and sheer drops. As he turned, a staccato series of beeps sounded in the earphones and he saw a square red light begin to pulse to his left, warning him that a rocket had already locked on to him. He hit the chaff and flare releases – two fist-sized knobs which would shoot a series of flares and large magnetic confetti to his rear in an attempt to confuse the incoming 57-mm rocket. At the same time he pulled up to a near-vertical climb, felt the Cobra sway and buck, then bump heavily as the rocket passed him only a few feet away.
The sky around him was cloudless and the sun was low. Another ten, maybe fifteen minutes and dusk would be on them. His only hope was to get in among the mountains and play tag with the two ‘Hips’ which must now be in pursuit.
They were slower and less manoeuvrable than the Cobra, but they had a long reach with their rockets. He only hoped that they were not carrying missiles. In the days of the Cold War, the ‘Hips’ had been the backbone of the Warsaw Pact forces, specifically redesigned to insert Spetsnaz troops. In that capacity they would almost certainly carry ‘Sagger’ anti-tank missiles which packed a lot of punch. If they could inflict damage on heavy armour, what would they do to a small craft like a Cobra? Bond wondered.
He opened the throttle a little more and adjusted the collective, racing towards the serrated rocks in front of him. He had confidence in being able to confuse and mislead the ’Hips’ in the dangerous game of leading the larger helicopters into situations from which they would find difficulty in extracting themselves.
Below, there were a few scattered and lonely houses, a road that clung to the side of the rockface and, in the distance, the glint of the lake which could only be Coeur d’Alene.
The two larger helicopters were getting very close now, putting some distance between each other, shaping up for the kill, he imagined, as he turned sharply behind the next huge pyramid of stone: a dangerous and terrifying mountain, full of crevices and outcrops of rock. The whole natural structure had to be almost two miles wide, and the pair of helicopters following would only be about a mile away now.
Under the natural cover of the mountain, Bond backed the Cobra off until he was hovering a mile away. If they had been following his run around the first mountain, they would, he prayed, split up, one keeping about five hundred feet above the other so that the pair could circle the mountain in different directions to catch him in a kind of pincer movement.
He armed two TOW missiles this time and waited . . . and waited. They took almost twenty minutes but, eventually, he saw one of the lumbering beasts break cover and come in from his them.
13
WATER CARNIVAL
In a fixed wing aircraft the loss of power is not always disastrous. The weight of conventional aeroplanes is supported by the wings. In a light plane, loss of power at height gives you the opportunity to glide and look for some convenient flat site upon which to land while you still have control. In larger aircraft the loss of one engine is usually only dangerous at low altitudes, or if a pilot in panic confuses which engine has gone out and closes down the wrong engine leaving him with no power at all. In the latter circumstances the aircraft is inclined to plummet rather than glide.
In a helicopter, the loss of power is much more dangerous for it is the rotor blades that carry the weight and provide movement. There was little Bond could do as the Cobra began to sink rapidly, its speed increasing as it dropped out of control. The hydraulics had gone with the power, so he could not even correct the collective angle on the slow-spinning rotor above him.
Desperately he tried to restart the engine as they descended through six thousand feet. The lake lay below them and he knew the price they would pay for travelling at around eighty knots an hour when hitting the water, which would be as good as running into a brick wall. The Cobra would go from eighty to zero in one split second, breaking apart and spreading itself around like a child’s toy trodden on by a large booted foot.
Again he tried to restart. There was a splutter this time, and he reckoned that the fuel lines were somehow clogged. Again. Another splutter. The altimeter showed five thousand feet . . . then four. Once more, at three thousand, and this time the splutter turned into a cough and the engine turned over, caught and began running very roughly.
The roughness made little difference; as long as the rotors could be controlled, it would be possible to make a softer landing. Gently he increased power and moved the collective control so that the angle of the rotor blades put them into a hover. The hover was not stable for the machine trembled and bucked as the engine still refused to run steadily, but it did slow them down and give him some control over the descent. He could see the lights of Coeur d’Alene just coming on off to his right. He managed to slow the descent even more and was also able to turn the craft in the direction of the town. He had already issued a Mayday to Spokane tower – noting from the board clipped to the central console that the helicopter’s call sign was Romeo Alpha – and now he kept up a silent stream of conversation in his head, willing the engine to at least keep turning over as he slid the chopper towards the town’s outskirts, knowing they stood more chance if he was able to put the Cobra down close to the shore.
‘Romeo Alpha, Spokane Control, still losing height around two miles west of Coeur d’Alene. Can you advise hard landing? Over.’ He ask‘James, d5Ned into the microphone.
‘Spokane Control, Romeo Alpha. We suggest ditching close inshore. Many buildings, and vehicles along the shoreline.’
‘Romeo Alpha, Spokane Control. I copy. Will try ditching as close as possible to shore. Will advise you just before we try to go in.’
It made sense. Nobody in their right mind would risk trying to make a hard landing on one of the lakeshore streets. There was traffic down there, and people moving around.
Fiddling with the cyclic and collective controls together with the throttle, he managed to get within a few yards of the lake’s edge, again trying to hover with some difficulty. People were starting to gather as though waiting for disaster, but Spokane tower must have got on to the emergency services at once because a rescue squad ambulance and fire engine had appeared. He made contact again.
‘Romeo Alpha, Spokane Control. We see rescue vehicles on shoreline. Am trying to ditch gently and as close to rescue team as possible. Over.’
‘Spokane Control, Romeo Alpha. Listening out. Good luck.’
The trick now was to slow the Cobra so that it settled gently on the water. Even if he could manage that, he knew he would have to try and keep the helicopter just airborne with its skids touching the lake in order to let Fliss and M get out – or at least open the canopy and allow the rescue workers to get to them. Unlike the ‘Hips’ which he had seen blown to pieces and crash down the mountainside, the Cobra did not possess any flotation gear. For all he knew, even a soft landing might lead to a complete submergence of the chopper.
The engine was showing signs of strain. For about two minutes he listened, with rising concern, to a high-pitched whine coming from above him, and it became more and more difficult to control the machine.
He raised a hand, trying to beckon the firemen and rescue squad people to come to him as he allowed the Cobra to edge down, closer to the water.
Suddenly he had to react violently as the nose pitched back, and he realized that the forward canopy was off. He saw Fliss trying to stand up. She waved to him and gave a thumbs-up, though the shifting weight in the nose was making accurate control almost impossible. The machine yawed viciously, dipping to the left. By the time he had straightened up, Fliss was gone. Three of the rescue teams were already in the water, dragging a rope with them while others had thrown lifebuoys into the lake.
Gently, he lowered the nose a fraction to make it easier for the rescuers to get at M. With great relief he saw that his old chief was, in fact, moving as though trying to lift himself from the nose cockpit. He could see Fliss again for a second as she held onto the side of the fuselage, attempting to assist M.
Bond felt the heaviness on the nose and tried to straighten the helicopter so that he could gain a little height. Then, without warning, all hell broke loose. The engine faltered then stopped, the rotor blades slapping slowly above him. There was nothing he could do but pop his canopy just as the Cobra went completely out of control, tipped sideways and, with a terrible crunching, cracking sound, turned turtle.
Near the lake shore he had expected the water to be shallow, but now he realized that it was deep: deep, dark, cold and with a strong undertow.
He banged down on his harness release and kicked himself from the cockpit, feeling the lake pull him out as he battled the waves which dragged him down and away from the Cobra in the sluice of water that flowed out of the lake into the Spokane River.
It seemed an eternity before he surfaced, lungs bursting as he gulped for air, up with?’
14
INTERLUDE
