by Bob Mayer
The AWACS’s control room continued to track the action. They had the one Blackhawk escaping to the east, the other inexplicably turning back to the west, flying near two blips indicating Chinese helicopters.
Things got worse in a heartbeat as one of Colonel Zycki’s operators called out. “We’ve got four fast movers lifting off out of the airbase outside Xi’an, sir.”
Zycki swore. “Damn it. This thing’s getting out of control. The Chinese must have picked up the Blackhawks on local radar. How long till the jets are in the area near the Blackhawk?”
The analyst next to the radar operator quickly calculated. “Twelve minutes, sir.”
“How far out are the F-117s?”
“They can make intercept, sir, but we need authorization for them to go hot.”
“Get me this Zandra person on the line.”
Harker and DeCamp settled in among the boulders on the crest of the small knoll and watched the Chinese squad approach in the moonlight. They were only a hundred meters away now and moving slowly toward them. Harker whispered to DeCamp, “Another fifty meters and we start firing.”
DeCamp checked his submachine gun and made sure he had a round in the chamber and the magazine was seated properly. Harker laid out two more magazines for quicker reloading.
“This is Zandra. Go ahead.” She was ignoring the glare of Lisa Duncan standing next to her, listening to the report from the AWACS.
“Yes, ma’am. Things are getting hairy over there. We’ve got one Blackhawk heading for the coast, but it’s got a hell of a long way to go. The other’s turned west for some reason. They’ve obviously been picked up on local radar as we’ve got two Chinese helicopters vectoring in on it. They’re about a minute out from intercept. We’ve also got four fast movers scrambled out of Xi’an. They’re nine minutes out. Our F-117s will be in range to intercept, but we need authorization for them to fire.”
“I understand,” Zandra said.
Zycki’s voice came out of the box. “Ma’am, neither of those helicopters is going to make it out without help. Those Chinese helicopters vectoring in are probably armed.”
“All right, order the flight leader of the F-117s to escort out the one Blackhawk that’s heading for the coast. It must have what we want on board.”
“That’s abandoning the other chopper to certain death,” Zycki argued.
“I don’t have time to—” Zandra began, but the mike was ripped out of her hand by Lisa Duncan.
“This is Lisa Duncan. I’m the president’s science adviser to UNAOC. You will order two F-117s to escort the Blackhawk heading for the coast,” Duncan said, “and the other two go help the second chopper. Is that clear, Colonel?”
“Quite clear.”
Zandra had made no attempt to regain the mike.
Harker took a deep breath. He let it out. “Are you ready?”
“Roger that.”
Harker took a deep breath and held it. He pulled back on the trigger and the submachine gun spoke. He hit his first two targets before the rest had gotten under cover. The return fire was intense, green tracers racing by in all directions.
O’Callaghan had the Blackhawk down very low, cut short in his attempt to go straight to the mountain by the interception of the Chinese helicopters. O’Callaghan was skimming along just above the surface of the streambed Turcotte had crossed not too long before. While he was down lower than the enemy could go, he was forced to go much slower than the Chinese helicopters at a higher altitude. As he took a left-hand bend in the river he glanced back. He could see the running lights of the lead enemy helicopter only eight hundred meters back. There was no way he could go to the other two men and pick them up without getting nailed.
“Arm the Stingers,” O’Callaghan ordered. He had his attention split between the course he was flying, the firefight on the mountain to his left, and the Chinese helicopters closing.
“Armed,” Spence replied.
O’Callaghan pulled back on the cyclic, kicked his left pedals, and swung the Blackhawk around 180 degrees to face the two oncoming Chinese helicopters.
As the Chinese pilots started to react to this startling maneuver, O’Callaghan pressed the fire button once, then a second time. Two Stingers leapt from the side of the helicopter. The lead helicopter took the missile straight in its air intake just below the blades and blossomed into a fireball. The trail MI-4 started to turn, but the supersonic missile lanced into the side of the engine.
Turcotte keyed the intercom. “Let’s get our guys and get out of here.”
O’Callaghan pulled up out of the riverbed and accelerated.
Harker turned and stared to the north at the ball of fire that had been ignited in the air down there. Then there was a second one. A burst of automatic fire from ahead caused him to turn his attention back to matters closer at hand. He fired another magazine, scattering rounds all over the hillside, keeping the Chinese at a distance.
“There. Ahead and to the left. Did you see those green and red tracers?” Turcotte was leaning forward, pointing between the two pilots. “The red is our people.”
“No shit I see them,” O’Callaghan said. “The problem is, are they gonna see us? That’s a hot landing zone.”
“We’ve got a solution for that,” Turcotte said as he turned back to the cargo bay.
Harker heard the rotor blades coming toward them. At first he didn’t see anything. He quickly pulled his goggles up and turned them on.
“Get your harness buckled!” Harker yelled out. DeCamp turned in surprise. “We’ve got a Blackhawk inbound.” Harker turned his infrared strobe on and held it up.
On board the helicopter, Turcotte slid the left door open while Howes slid the right open. Each held a 120-foot nylon rope in a deployment bag in his arms. O’Callaghan flared the Blackhawk to a halt eight feet above the tumbled ground surrounding the IR strobe. The two bags were thrown out and hurtled to the ground.
“I’ve got this one.” DeCamp yelled as he ran forward and secured the rope. He pulled the deployment bag off and hooked the loop tied in the end through the two snap links in the shoulders of his combat vest. Seventy feet away Harker did the same. The two ran together and linked arms.
There had been no shots fired yet by the Chinese soldiers. They probably still didn’t understand what was happening and assumed the helicopter was one of their own.
“We’ve got them,” Turcotte yelled as he peered off the deck of the cargo compartment. O’Callaghan snatched in collective and quickly pulled the helicopter onto an easterly heading.
Harker and DeCamp felt their vests tighten around them as the rope became taut. Their feet came off the ground and they were savagely swung out to the west by centrifugal force. Harker gasped for breath as he and DeCamp held on to each other.
O’Callaghan straightened out the chopper and turned to the east.
“Find someplace to land. We’ve got to get them in.” Turcotte watched tracers from the ground make a pattern around Harker and DeCamp and pass by the helicopter.
“We can’t. There’s no time. Pull them in!” O’Callaghan yelled back.
DeCamp felt his rope jerk. He looked up and saw someone hanging over the edge of the deck signaling him to separate from Harker. He shook Harker and pointed up. They both began pulling themselves hand over hand up the ropes, even as the ropes were being pulled in.
DeCamp was pulled into the cargo compartment. Harker was hanging less than twenty feet below, slowly being pulled up. That was good enough, O’Callaghan figured. He dropped down close to the earth and raced off to the east as fast as he could push the chopper.
Twenty miles to the east, lying on the floor of the cargo bay of the first Blackhawk, Professor Nabinger had his eyes closed. His mind was absorbed with the images he’d received from the guardian inside Qian-Ling. There was much he didn’t understand, but one thing was clear to him: he had to stop Aspasia!
Then he remembered something else. The central tunnel in the tomb that was gua
rded by the holograph and the ray! He knew where it led and what was down there. And he knew how to get in there! No matter what happened, Nabinger knew he would have to come back to Qian-Ling.
He pulled out his leather-bound notebook and began writing furiously.
At Osan Air Force Base in South Korea, Zandra and Duncan were listening to the radio traffic from the AWACS when there was a beeping noise from Zandra’s laptop.
She quickly turned in her seat and entered a code. She read the message on the screen, then rapidly typed out commands.
“What’s wrong?” Duncan asked.
“Foo fighters,” was Zandra’s succinct answer. “Two of them are heading for China.”
In the Cube at Area 51 Kelly Reynolds knew nothing of the drama being played out over the skies of China, but she could follow the progress of the foo fighters. They were almost at the end of the Pacific and nearing the coast of China.
“What’s going on?” she asked Quinn, who had been hooked in to the military’s secure MILSTAR communications net.
“They’re pissed in the Pentagon. They lost a lot of men on that sub.”
“But they interfered...” Kelly began, stopping as she saw the look on Quinn’s face. She suddenly realized that perhaps not everyone was as anxious to have Aspasia land as she was. And that those who had died on the submarine were more than just numbers to a lot of people.
“They think the foo fighters are going to intercept the choppers,” Quinn added.
“Why would they do that?”
“That’s a good question, isn’t it?”
“Splash four,” the pilot of one of the F-117s laconically reported over the radio to the AWACS, as if it were an everyday event. The F-117s had launched four air-to-air missiles from over forty miles away. The Chinese pilots had never even known they were targeted when their planes exploded.
“Roger that.” Colonel Zycki dropped down into his padded command chair and relaxed for the first time in hours.
It only lasted a few seconds.
“Sir, we’ve got two foo fighters three minutes out from the lead Blackhawk.”
“Are the F-117s out in front?”
“Yes, sir. One minute to intercept,” the radar operator informed Zycki.
Zycki had received word over the secure scrambler about the fate of the Pasadena. “Tell them to fire as soon as the foo fighters are in range.”
“Great,” the pilot of the lead F-117 muttered as he received that order. He had the foo fighters on his small radar screen, closing fast. He hit the fire button immediately, launching two air-to-air missiles at the incoming objects. His wingman did the same.
Nabinger’s Blackhawk was ten miles behind them, flying low to the ground.
Colonel Zycki could see the four missiles racing toward the foo fighters. They had closed half the gap when the missiles simply disappeared.
“Oh, shit,” Zycki whispered.
Then as the two foo fighters closed on their position the dots representing the four F-117 Stealth fighters blipped out. That left just the foo fighters and the two Blackhawks. The foo fighters closed on the lead one. “Twenty seconds until intercept!”
“We’ve got foo fighters inbound!” the pilot yelled, startling Nabinger out of his reverie about what was secreted in the lowest level of the imperial tomb of Qian-Ling. “Our escort is down!”
The chopper shook as the pilots began evasive maneuvers. Nabinger reached forward and grabbed one of them on the shoulder. “I need a radio link!”
The pilot threw him a headset. Nabinger put it on and keyed the mike. “Hello! Hello! Is anyone listening?”
Duncan still had the mike in her hand, listening to events forwarded from the AWACS. She recognized the voice on the radio. “Professor, this is Dr. Duncan!”
Nabinger’s hand was wrapped tight around the small boom mike. He could now see the two foo fighters looping in, small glowing golden orbs in the sky.
He pushed the transmit button. “In the tomb—Qian-Ling—in the very bottom chamber—there’s—” He paused as a rushing noise filled the headset, rising to an ear-piercing screech, forcing him to rip the headset off, trying to stop the agonizing pain that tore through his brain.
The Blackhawk’s engines abruptly stopped functioning along with every other piece of machinery on board the craft. The helicopter nosed over and dropped like a rock.
The last thing Nabinger saw before impact were the two foo fighters hanging overhead, like two small moons illuminating his death.
“Professor!” Duncan yelled into the microphone.
“It’s down,” Colonel Zycki announced over the radio.
In the back of the trail chopper Turcotte had listened to the crash of the lead helicopter and Professor Nabinger in stunned silence. He’d had a run-in with foo fighters before and knew they could easily incapacitate a helicopter. There was also no way to outrun the small glowing orbs.
“Cut all your power!” he yelled into the intercom. “Set us down!”
O’Callaghan twisted his head to look at Turcotte in disbelief. “What?”
“Kill the engine and autorotate,” Turcotte yelled, “or we’re all going to die!”
“Shut down!” O’Callaghan ordered Spence.
O’Callaghan reached up and hit the emergency shutdown, a move that was never supposed to be done while the helicopter was in the air. At the same time, Spence disengaged the transmission, freeing the blades to rotate on their own, slowing the chopper’s descent. He then began running his hands down the rows of controls, flipping off every system that had been on.
O’Callaghan glanced down. He spotted a small clearing among the trees. He pushed hard on the cyclic, trying to get the chopper to it.
Two foo fighters appeared, racing past the helicopter and disappearing to the rear.
“Brace for crash!” O’Callaghan yelled as he realized they weren’t quite going to make the open area. The Blackhawk hit the trees and rolled to the left.
The aircraft tore through the thick tree cover and came to a halt on the ground. The combination of the original forward speed and the sudden drop in altitude produced a collision that crumpled the left front of the helicopter. Shattered glass, twisted metal, and pieces of trees filled the front of the aircraft.
On impact all the occupants of the cargo bay had been thrown forward in a pile. Turcotte shook his head, trying to clear it. He could smell jet fuel leaking. As soon as that fuel touched part of the hot engine, Turcotte knew the helicopter would become an inferno.
Someone got the side door open. He could see Harker silhouetted against the door for a moment, then tumble out. Turcotte turned to the front to help O’Callaghan, who was trying to tear through the wreckage and free his co-pilot. Turcotte could see the blood seeping from under the man’s helmet. Turcotte reached forward and felt the co-pilot’s neck.
Turcotte let go and grabbed O’Callaghan, who was fumbling with the co-pilot’s shoulder harness. “He’s dead!”
O’Callaghan shook his hand off and continued to work to free the body.
“Leave him!” Turcotte yelled. “The chopper’s gonna blow!”
Turcotte simply grabbed the pilot and pulled him between the seats into the cargo bay. Then he shoved O’Callaghan toward the open cargo door.
Fuel reached the hot engine exhausts and burst into flames. Instantly, the helicopter became an inferno. Turcotte staggered away from the flames, pushing O’Callaghan ahead of him.
They were thirty meters away when the helicopter exploded. The impact threw them all to the ground.
“Second Blackhawk is down.” Colonel Zycki’s voice was flat. “All aircraft are down.”
Duncan pushed back from the control console and stared at Zandra. “There! Are you satisfied now? We have nothing!” She pointed at her watch. “Twenty-eight hours until the Airlia arrives and all we’ve managed to do is kill some damn good people.”
The six talons were still crisscrossing each other’s paths as they moved toward Ea
rth. The large open field in Central Park had been cleared and blocked off. UNAOC was busy preparing the format for the reception of the Airlia and determining the pecking order of world leaders who would get to meet Aspasia.
It was the middle of the night, four hours before dawn, the last dawn before the Airlia arrived. The headlines of the early morning editions currently being printed trumpeted it as the last day the human race would stand alone on the face of the Earth.
Things behind the scenes in the Cube looked very different, though. Major Quinn had finally been brought fully into the loop by the Pentagon, based on the assumption that if anyone knew how to counter the foo fighters, it would be the personnel at Area 51. He also had forwarded intercepts from Zandra in South Korea to STAAR in Antarctica, and that was causing great consternation in the covert world in Washington as the CIA was denying she worked for them and no one could quite figure out who Zandra or her organization, STAAR, was, or how it had managed to gain such power.
Kelly Reynolds watched all this with dismay overlaid with grief over the news that Peter Nabinger and Mike Turcotte were dead. She was in the Cube conference room with Quinn, listening to the latter’s video-conference call with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president in the War Room under the Pentagon.
“What about this STAAR person you have there, Major?” General Carthart, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked.
“She’s still in the hangar with the bouncer,” Quinn answered.
“Any idea what she’s up to?” Carthart asked.
“No, sir.”
“The hell with that,” Hunt, the director of the CIA, snarled. “If none of us in this room know, then something is seriously wrong.”
“I don’t think so,” the president said. “There is a presidential directive authorizing STAAR. It was signed forty years ago by Eisenhower but it is still legal and binding today. I have to believe my predecessor had a good reason for signing it and deliberately keeping us in the dark.” The president turned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “General?”
