by J. B. Hadley
“Don’t mind him,” Baker said. “He’s not part of the Nanticoke’s brain trust.”
“Turner has more horse sense than you’ll ever have, Baker,” Crippenby said. “All I’ve seen of you in Afghanistan is someone sulking like a kid and being a help to no one. Yet the moment Campbell gets you safely out of Afghanistan, you start mouthing off as if you were the one who led us through it all. If you hadn’t been such a louse up to this point, I’d be tempted to listen to you because, yes, I think Campbell is being reckless. But if I have to choose between his crazy maneuvers and your bullying sulks, I’ll have to go with the one who brought us this far, won’t I?”
After Crippenby had walked away Winston slapped Baker on the shoulder, and said, “That was a reasonable response, and one you deserved, David. Better come along and hold your peace until something goes wrong.”
“That Sikorsky HH-3 is what will go wrong,” Baker predicted grimly.
But he wasn’t thinking clearly. First of all they had to get to the Sikorsky.
Mike broke out a supply of Belgian HE-RFL-60N antipersonnel rifle grenades. “Remember, you don’t have to hit someone. These are just as effective behind someone taking cover. It breaks into five hundred pieces and is lethal out to eight meters from the point of impact. But it will cut the shit out of them out to fifty meters. So spread them around. The range is about three hundred meters, so we’ll flatten the bastards out as we move and empty our magazines into any that survive.”
“Let’s do it,” Waller growled, his husky voice turned savage.
“Campbell, as soon as we kill them, we will have lost our negotiating power.” It was Baker. He stood up out of cover. “I am not prepared to sacrifice—”
Verdoux lunged at him, but Baker dodged him and ran forward, downhill, waving his arms to get the attention of the Revolutionary Guards below. “Peace! Peace! We come in the name of peace! We must speak with the Ayatollah Khomeini!”
Campbell pulled the rifle grenade from the muzzle of his Kalashnikov, fired a burst of three shots from the hip, and brought down Baker with two bullets in his right thigh.
“Winston! Turner! Carry him!” Campbell shouted, pushing the rifle grenade back in the barrel of his gun. “Verdoux! Nolan! Cover them and escort them! Hardwick, Murphy, Waller, Crippenby, ready your grenades! All right, men, see those choppers? Let’s go!”
The team moved downhill at a run and enveloped Winston and Turner, who were carrying Baker, screaming with pain, none too gently between them. They took some light, wildly aimed fire from the surprised Revolutionary Guards, but the mercs used their time and energy in covering ground. Only when they were quite close did Campbell release the first antipersonnel rifle grenade. It burst a couple of hundred yards directly in front of them, and its hundreds of white-hot metal fragments tore through the flesh of the surrounding Iranians. Four other grenades followed, each man finding his own area, cutting a swath in front of the team.
They were soon running among the screaming, dying, struggling Pasdaran. They had asked to be martyrs for the Islamic revolution, but it seemed to Campbell that most seemed not too happy to have their wish granted. Having emptied and replaced a thirty-round magazine, he replaced it and fitted another grenade in the barrel.
The second wave of grenades was even more devastating than the first, because the Pasdaran were thicker on the ground. It was no longer possible to avoid stepping on the dead and dying.
As always, Campbell was astounded at the multiple slaughter it was possible for a trained, disciplined, small unit with a defined objective to inflict on a large, undisciplined, poorly trained mass that did not possess a clearly defined plan of action to meet the circumstances.
They gained the chopper landing zone without sustaining any casualties and used the fuselages of the parked Hueys as cover.
“This way!” Lance yelled, having found a Sikorsky HH-3.
As they ran, they passed two Iranians in flight suits. Mike noticed that IMPERIAL was poorly inked out on their prerevolutionary badges. They had holstered pistols on their hips, but they made a show of putting their hands behind their backs and looking away. These armed forces men seemed less than upset at the beating the Revolutionary Guards had taken and probably resented having had to ferry them here.
“Bob! Lance! If I can’t get this mother started, you two go back for them!” Campbell shouted as he ran to the Sikorsky.
Mike sat in the cockpit and tried to “think helicopter.” He got the twin turbines started with no trouble while the others were still climbing in and passing Baker on board. It was the disk formed by the revolving rotor blades that actually flew. The fuselage or main body of the chopper went along only because it was suspended from this disk by a mast. That was the big difference between flying a chopper and a fixed-wing plane. Here you were flying a spinning disk with dead weight hanging from it.
Mike reached to the left of the pilot’s seat and gently pulled up on the collective control stick. This increased the pitch angles of the main rotor blades and caused the disk, along with the chopper attached to it, to rise.
“Check the gauges, Andre,” Mike commanded. “How are we on fuel?”
The throttle twist-grip was on the end of the collective stick, and Mike had to give the engines more throttle as he raised the stick for takeoff. Too much or too little could produce dangerous effects. Needless to say, Mike had no idea what was too much or too little in this Sikorsky.
The cyclic control stick was placed vertically between his legs. Moving this stick in any direction caused the rotating blades to increase in pitch and move higher on one half of their cycle and feather on the other half. This in turn caused the disk to tilt in the direction in which the cyclic stick was pushed, and thus the chopper moved in that direction.
As the main motor spins, torque revolves the fuselage slowly in the opposite direction. The tail rotor controls this movement by pushing the tail sideways against the torque. The left pedal increases the tail rotor pitch and pushes the tail to the right and the nose to the left. The right pedal produced the opposite effect. The left-hand throttle had to be adjusted in time with these maneuvers, more power with the left pedal, less with the right.
That was it. Nothing much more to it.
Andre yelled that they had full fuel tanks, and as far as he could see and understand, everything was in order.
Mike gave it throttle with his left hand and gently eased up the collective stick. The big chopper jumped off the ground like a person stung by a hornet. The rotor blades roared crazily over their heads, and the entire craft began to vibrate and rattle. Then it began sinking and rising in sharp stomach-churning jerks. The more Campbell tried to correct this up-and-down motion with the collective stick, the more pronounced it became.
Mike decided that the only way out was up, so he raised the collective stick and gave it more throttle, trying to keep it straight with the left pedal as he eased on the cyclic stick to see if he could stop the now violent vibrations. About twenty feet above the ground, both engines cut out and the chopper began to fall.
Campbell pushed the collective stick all the way down. This flattened the pitch angle of the rotors and allowed them to continue spinning, which provided lift. If he had not gotten the collective stick down instantly, the chopper would have dropped like a stone. As it was, they bounced hard on their three wheels onto the ground.
“That’s called an autorotation,” Campbell said in the calm voice that signaled things were going bad. “Anyone who wishes to discuss things with the Ayatollah Khomeini should leave the craft now.”
The others were too shaken to understand a word he was saying.
The engines roared to life again, and Campbell gave them the throttle and raised the collective stick in his left hand. As the Sikorsky lifted off the ground this time, its nose made an abrupt right-angle turn. Then it started moving in odd directions in short, fast darts, as if hysterical—yet all the time it kept rising. At length it moved westward, unstea
dily but definitely under way by this time.
A bullet ripped up through the floor near Mike’s right foot “Hey, we’re under fire!”
Andre smiled and pointed to a number of other bullet holes in the sides and floor. “Mike, we have been for some time. Nobody wanted to mention it in case it distracted you.”
“Is everyone all right?” Campbell asked anxiously.
“So far, Mike. Please keep your eye on what you’re doing. Why is the ground rising up at us so quick?”
As they passed south of Teheran and north of Qom, only two hundred feet above the rolling, sandy wastes, two Tomcats searched for them above.
“Last time I was in a Tomcat was with a crazy bastard called Glasseyes, and he practiced a night landing on the U.S.S. Constellation off San Diego. Now we have the same planes up there looking to destroy us. I guess we sold some to the Shah.”
The Iranian pilots did not pick out the camouflaged helicopter against the sandy wastes, and the chopper was either flying too low for the aircraft radar to pick it up or the radar was defective, as so much Iranian-owned American-made equipment was these days because of America’s refusal to sell Iran spare parts.
They knew they had it made when an F-14 Phantom jet also failed to spot them. They saw a river ahead, and beneath them they saw shelters constructed of corrugated zinc, sandbags, and metal ammo cases. Clothes hung out to dry, people went here and there on motorcycles, and no one on the ground paid any attention to them.
This changed fast when they crossed the river. Antiair- craft shells exploded around them, and flak tore the metal skin of the fuselage. They had no chance to establish radio communication because of the suddenness with which they crossed the battle lines from one side to another. All the Iraqis could see was an invading Iranian helicopter. It would be only a matter of seconds before they took a direct hit.
Mike switched off the twin turbines and yelled, “Autorotation!”
He remembered to push down the collective stick as far as it would go.
The Iraqi officer had a clipped mustache, freshly pressed fatigues, and a British manner.
“Certainly I was surprised to see Afghans emerge from an Iranian helicopter,” he said as they watched a medical evacuation chopper move Baker to a field hospital, “although you have to be the most unconvincing Afghans I’ve ever seen. When I heard your American accents, I thought, ‘My God, this is publicity for some film these people are making.9 That fellow we evacuated seemed a bit upset at you.”
“He was disappointed at not having met the Ayatollah Khomeini,” Mike said.
“I don’t think he missed much.” The officer took them aboard a chopper for the ride to Baghdad. When they were seated, he looked over their Afghan garb. “Appalling,” he said with a smile. “I take it you have been in Afghanistan.”
Mike nodded.
The officer laughed. “You know, we don’t much like Americans here in Iraq. But now I think we’re slowly coming round to the opinion that anyone who is hated as much as you are by the Russians and Iranians must have some good in them.”
“Nice to know,” Mike said, and dozed off.
A deadly error by some high-level decision-makers leaves three American defense experts trapped in Afghanistan. The Soviets are crawling all over the war-torn country looking for them. And any U.S. rescue attempt—any aggressive act of interference—would be crazy.
It's the kind of job the Point Team is looking for Dangerous. Nearly impossible Up against the tanks, missiles and fully equipped troops of the Russian army, Special Forces vet Mike Campbell and his band of six specially trained mercs must battle their way across a land—and controlled—by the Soviets and their Afghan hit men. But the combat-hardened squad is armed and ready to play the deadliest game of their careers. A game where the odds are low, the stakes are high—and a million dollar payoff is waiting at the finish line…
They live to fight
And fight to win…
THE
POINT TEAM
