by DL Barbur
“There’s one more thing, Dale. These guys might have a belt fed weapon.”
He gave a low whistle. “Well, that does make things more interesting. Be careful flying around in that little egg beater chopper of yours. They tend to attract bullets.”
If he said anything else, it was lost in the roar of the helicopter’s engine and rotors. I handed the phone back to Dalton as Jack landed a little ways off.
Dalton, Eddie, and Struecker each took a seat on the benches. Jack waved at me and pointed to a pile of gear strapped to the co-pilot seat next to him. I pulled out a plate carrier with extra ammo strapped to it and a gun case. Jack waved at me and gestured at the rotor blades whirling overhead.
I was glad he’d done it. My natural instinct to donning the carrier was to stick one arm up through the opening, which might well have put my hand into the rotor arc. Instead, I bent low and managed to wiggle into the vest. I pulled the rifle out of the case and slung it around my neck. Next came a helmet with an integrated microphone and headset.
I took a seat on the bench of the Little Bird, belted myself in, and gave Jack a thumbs up. He pulled up on the collective, and the little helicopter wallowed into the air, its engine straining.
Riding strapped to the outside of a helicopter was a vastly different experience than riding on the inside. The last time I’d done this, it had been over Mogadishu, Somalia. I tried to push that thought out of my mind. That awful, bloody battle had technically been a victory, but I’d seen too many good men die or be maimed to celebrate it.
Jack gained altitude in a slow, upwards spiral, then pointed the nose of the Little Bird to the east and poured on the gas. The Portland skyline grew bigger as we flew. Powell Butte lay on the other side.
I pushed thoughts of Mogadishu out of my head and told myself things would be different this time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Although it was a warm June day, the ride across the city was cold. Even overloaded, the Little Bird was probably barreling through the sky at pretty close to a hundred miles an hour. We swung north of downtown, to avoid the tall buildings, but we were still close enough to see some plumes of smoke. Apparently, somebody had set some fires. That reminded me of the thick black columns of smoke hanging over Mogadishu, from piles of burning tires, and once again I shoved those memories out of my mind.
“What’s the plan, boys?” Jack said over our radios.
“Let’s do some orbits of the park,” Dalton said. “If we don’t see anything suspicious, we’ll establish two observation posts on some high ground. Hopefully, we can get the city to get its shit together soon, and they’ll post some of their security people or some cops out here. I don’t want to get stuck pulling guard duty all day.”
I could sense his frustration, and I shared it. This was likely to be a long, boring day standing in the sun wearing thirty pounds of body armor and getting gawked at by Portland hipsters out walking their dogs.
The butte came up quick. Goosebumps from the cold aside, I was enjoying all this flying around the city by helicopter. Portland wasn’t huge, as cities went, but even on a good day, the traffic was bad. Driving from out in Washington county all the way across town to Powell Butte would have easily been an hour long slog, probably more with all the traffic being diverted out of downtown. We covered it in just a few minutes.
Jack did a couple of orbits of the park, each one at lower altitudes. It looked like business as usual. I saw groups of people walking their dogs, and taking in the views of the mountains. The parking lot was full, but it was mostly sedans with a smattering of SUVs and light trucks. I didn’t see any sign of any moving trucks or similar large vehicles. They would have been unusual here on a normal day, but today they would have set off a giant red flag.
We hovered near the Mountain Finder, a place in the park where you could see all the mountains that surrounded Portland. It also overlooked big swaths of the park. Jack brought the skids to within a few inches of the ground and a couple of Portlanders watched, mouths agape, as Struecker and Eddie hopped off. Of course one of them whipped her cell phone and started taking video. Great.
Jack then moved the helo east, flying slow with the skids only a hundred or so feet above the ground. The Little Bird was unbalanced because Dalton and I were both sitting on one side. He took us to the ground over the reservoir itself, where we could keep an eye on the infrastructure. We were only a few hundred yards from the parking lot, so we’d be able to see that too. I anticipated a long day in the hot sun, guarding millions of gallons of water with nothing to drink.
As we headed towards the reservoir, I saw three vehicles moving up the access road to the parking lot. Two were pickup trucks with a pair of men riding in each bed. The other was a rental moving truck.
I keyed my radio microphone. “Dalton? The trucks?”
“I see them. Jack, get us on the ground.”
I opened my mouth to argue. We would be vulnerable as the Little Bird made it’s long, slow, wallowing approach to the ground. Better to pull pitch and get us up in the air.
Before I could speak, one of the pickups jerked to a halt. A man stood up in the bed. Even from almost a quarter mile away, I recognized the gun he picked up. It was an M240B belt-fed machine gun. I’d carried one often enough in the Rangers to know it well.
At first, the red tracer rounds seemed to be floating lazily towards us, but the closer they got, the faster they seemed to move. Something hit the side of the helicopter next to my head with a thud loud enough that I could hear it over the engines. A tracer actually passed between my lower legs and I froze for a second, mesmerized by the faint red will’o wisps headed my way. Part of my brain was trying to do the math. For every tracer round I saw, there were four more plain old bullets I couldn’t see.
I hit the latch on my safety belt and jumped off while the Little Bird’s skids were still head high above the ground. Apparently, Dalton had the same plan. In my peripheral vision, I saw him drop off the bench too.
Thanks to the extra weight of my gear, I hit hard. I kept my legs loose and did a classic airborne ranger parachute landing fall, so I didn’t break anything, but it was still no picnic. This stuff was easier when I was nineteen. I felt the air whoosh out of my lungs, and that familiar panicky feeling of not being able to breathe from having the wind knocked out of me.
I wound up on my back, with the sun in my eyes and gasping for breath. For a second I thought the Little Bird was going to land on me. It was banked over hard left, so far I thought the rotor blades were going to clip the ground, then the engine screamed as Jack poured on the power. Freed of the weight of me and Dalton, the helicopter shot into the sky with a flock of tracers chasing it. One of them hit the left side skid and bounced off, then the Little Bird was gone, hauling away from us as fast as Jack could make it go.
For a second there was quiet. I rolled over onto my stomach in the almost foot high grass and weeds. I managed to catch my breath, then saw Dalton about twenty feet from me. Our eyes met and we started crawling towards each other.
I heard the ripping, cracking sound of bullets passing overhead, followed an instant later by the sound of the gun going off down the hill from us. I pressed myself into the dirt, trying to become one with the earth.
I turned my head and could see geysers of dirt erupting from the hillside fifty yards or so uphill. It had been a while since somebody had shot a machine gun at me. After a few bursts, I started to get used to it again. I realized we were in a depression about a foot and a half deep. The gunner below us could rake the ground above and below us on the slope, but for the moment at least, we were safe.
I crawled up to Dalton, who was trying to see what was going down below without getting the top of his head blown off.
“We’re in dead ground here,” he said.
“Yeah, but we can’t move,” I said as another burst tore overhead. I could tell Dalton was looking at me to see how I was handling myself now that the shit was flying for real. I wa
s glad I’d had a couple of seconds to compose myself.
Dalton reported in to Bolle on the radio while the rounds tore overhead. While he talked I tried to simultaneously look around and not get shot at the same time. The pace of fire was slacking off. Belt fed machine guns had a voracious appetite for ammunition, and it was hard to keep up sustained fire for very long without running out.
There had been some hikers gawking at the helicopter right before the shooting started. I didn’t see them now, hopefully because they’d had the sense to run away, and not because they were lying in the grass bleeding out.
I parted some of the grass and rose up a few inches. I could see the parking lot a little better. One pickup was parked nose towards us, with the gunner standing in back. It looked like they’d created some kind of makeshift pintle mount in the bed of the truck. The second pickup was blocking the access road to the park. There was a second gunner in the back of that one, with a field of fire that would shred anybody that tried to drive in. As I watched, a Subaru drove up the access road, and the gunner put a burst through the windshield.
“Two gunners,” I said to Dalton. “Both belt-fed. They’re shooting at people trying to drive in.”
Dalton relayed that. I got a glimpse of a couple guys rolling up the back door of the moving van, then the gunner covering our position opened up. I buried myself into the ground as dirt sprayed a few feet in front of me, then I heard rounds passing overhead.
“We’ll get there as soon as we can,” Bolle said after Dalton finished describing the situation.
“If they come charging up that road, they’re gonna get cut to pieces,” I said.
Before Dalton could reply, I heard the popping sound of rifle fire off to our right.
“Dent? Dalton?” Eddie’s voice came over the radio. “We can see you. We’re sending some rounds their way, but they are a long way off.” Over his mike, I could hear the shots even louder. Struecker must have been the one firing. I did the math in my head. Eddie and Struecker were right at the limit of the effective range of the weapons we were carrying. The stubby ten-inch barrels made them perfect for maneuvering inside cramped spaces, but they robbed the bullets of velocity they needed to engage out past a couple hundred yards.
The machine gun below us opened up again, but this time no rounds landed near us. They must have been shooting at Eddie and Struecker.
“We’re kinda hosed here. We’ve got nothing but open ground between us and that gun,” Dalton said.
“Dalton?” Jack’s voice crackled over our radio earpieces.
“You still up there?” Dalton asked.
“Yeah, I’m standing off a way. I took some rounds but I’m still flying. You’ve got two assholes with belt feds in the back of a pair of pickups, and some more assholes monkeying around in the back of a moving truck. All I’ve got is a pistol.”
Jack sounded frustrated. He wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know, but it was still nice to know he was up there.
“Give me your phone,” I said to Dalton.
“What? You want to dial 911 or something?”
“Just give it to me. I’m going to get a sniper in the air.”
He handed me the phone and I dialed Dale.
“It’s hanging low, I don’t have time to fuck around,” I said when he answered.
“What the hell have you gotten into over there? It sounds like the Tet Offensive all over again.”
“Where are you, and do you have your rifle with you?”
“I’m at my car a few blocks from the park entrance. The rifle is right here in the trunk.”
“You ever do any sniping from an airborne helicopter?”
“Not this century, but I reckon it’s like riding a bicycle.”
Between me talking to Dale on the phone, and Dalton talking to Jack on the radio, we managed to coordinate a place for them to meet. There was a church parking lot a half mile from us where Jack could land. As we talked, Eddie and Struecker drew some of the heat from us. They worked their way into a position a couple of hundred yards to our east and would pop up and shoot at the guys in the parking lot. They had a little more room to fire and maneuver, but it was only a matter of time before somebody caught a bullet.
“Bad news Dent,” Eddie said over the radio. “There are cops coming up the access road.”
“Shit,” I said. “There’s always somebody that doesn’t get the memo.”
“I’ve been looking at the ground between them and us,” Dalton said, in level tones. “There’s plenty of little depressions between us and them. Let’s spread out. You throw a bang and then we’ll alternate rushes. I’ll go first.”
What Dalton was proposing was likely suicide, but I wasn’t about to let a bunch of Portland cops get chewed up by machine gun fire. In between bursts of gunfire, I heard the sound of sirens echoing all around the city. There were likely to be hundreds of cops here in the next few minutes, and I was guessing dozens of them would be dead if we didn’t silence those guns.
I nodded and we wiggled to opposite ends of our little swale. As Dalton crawled he keyed his mic.
“Eddie, we’re going to assault the parking lot by bounding overwatch.”
“Huh?” was Eddie’s reply.
It was my turn to key the mic. “Just shoot at the assholes in the parking lot, Eddie.”
Eddie was a good guy to have in a fight, but I got the impression that his experience ran more towards the street brawl variety, and that he hadn’t had any military training.
Dalton gave me a thumbs up. I pulled a flashbang off my vest, pulled the pin, let the lever go and hurled as far up and out as I could while lying on my side.
“Bang out!” I yelled. It was sort of unnecessary, but that’s how we did it in the Rangers and I didn’t want this Delta guy to show me up.
I knew the bang was coming, but I still flinched when it went off. Dalton took off down the hill like a jackrabbit, somehow managing to run down the slope without falling. I rolled up to my knees and took the safety off my carbine. For the last few minutes, my world had narrowed to a small claustrophobic space in the weeds. Now I had the whole slope in front of me.
The guy in the pickup closest to us was trying to track Dalton as he rushed down the hill. He was getting excited and instead of laying down short bursts, he just mashed down the trigger and tried to hose the hillside. His buddy was busy trying to link another belt to the one rapidly disappearing into the hungry maw of the gun. On the far side of the parking lot, I saw the other gunner open up on the approaching police cars.
My rifle had a simple, electronic red dot sight with no magnification, perfect for close quarters battle but the wrong tool for this job. At this range, the red dot floating in the center of the scope tube almost covered the whole cab of the pickup. I placed the dot over the machine gunner and started squeezing the trigger. I was firing on semi-automatic, so I only got one bullet with each trigger press, but I was pulling it pretty quick.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Dalton drop into a little depression in the ground, and start shooting.
Then it was my turn to run into the machine gun fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
At some point, the US Army determined that a man could run for three to five seconds, and as long as dropped and found cover before that time was up, they had a reasonable chance of not getting shot. Thus, one of the basic skills drilled into every infantryman was the three to five-second rush. I’d done thousands of them during my time in the Army, and as I got up and charged down the hill, I counted in my head.
One one thousand. I felt horribly exposed and wanted nothing but to just lie right back down and hug the ground again. Dalton was prone on the ground, pulling the trigger for all he was worth, while the ground erupted with bullet strikes around him, so I couldn’t abandon him. I zigzagged down the uneven slope. It was half run, half stumble. I tried to plan where I was going to plant my feet. The last thing I needed was a broken ankle right now.
> Two one thousand. The gunner finally realized he was hitting high, far up the hillside behind Dalton, and let up on the trigger. My movement must have caught his assistant’s eye because he slapped the gunner on the shoulder and pointed in my direction. Given a choice between the target he’d chewed up a hillside trying to hit, and a new target running straight at him, the gunner apparently decided I was the better choice.
Three one thousand. The muzzle of the gun swung towards me. Dalton squeezed the trigger even faster, and even from this distance, I could see the windshield of the truck craze and spiderweb from his rounds hitting it. He was hitting low, because of the range. I probably had been too. I started looking for a place to land. There was a little depression in the ground, something I wouldn’t have even noticed on a normal day, but right now it looked like safety.
Four one thousand. I dove for the little depression in the ground like a crazed baseball player going head first into home plate. I hit the ground just as the gunner opened up and a swarm of bullets passed overhead.
I gulped some air and looked for Dalton. He slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle, then rose to a crouch. I slithered a few feet away from where I’d disappeared from the gunner’s view, then popped up and started shooting. I remembered to hold high this time. I floated the dot half way over the gunner’s head.
There’s a knack to shooting a belt-fed machine gun at a moving target, and this guy didn’t have it. When he first started shooting, he’d been exercising some discipline and shooting short bursts, but now he was treating the gun like a giant bullet hose. You had to lead your target and fire short, controlled bursts. This guy saw Dalton pop up and mashed down on the trigger and swept the muzzle across the hillside. I wondered if he realized there were two of us. There was only a dozen or so feet between me and Dalton, and in the dust noise and confusion, two dudes wearing body armor looked pretty much the same.
