Soar

by John Weisman

  Ritzik frowned, momentarily knocked off course. Then he fiddled with the radio. “TOC, Loner—” There was a momentary pause. “TOC, we’re gonna stay on the air until further notice. I need play-by-play tactical overhead.” He paused. “Roger that.”

  Ritzik saw Rowdy Yates jump off the tailgate of the big truck. He put two fingers to his lips, whistled shrilly to get the sergeant major’s attention, and beckoned him over.

  “How’s she coming?”

  “She’s got the damn thing opened up.” Rowdy stroked his Fu Manchu mustache. “I wish we had an exhaust fan. The battery fumes are pretty damn strong.”

  Ritzik said, “Why not just pull the canvas off the frame?”

  “I asked. Steel grommets. Steel frame. She’s worried about static electricity.”

  “From canvas?”

  “From everything,” Yates said. “The HE 22 is sweating. That is one nervous woman, boss.”

  “With reason.” Ritzik flicked a pebble with the toe of his boot. “Tell Bill to slice the canvas so she has some light.”

  “Gotcha.” The sergeant major wiped a big hand over his bald head. “I gotta tell you—if it had been me working on that thing, we’d all be vaporized by now.”

  Abruptly, Ritzik said, “Rowdy, we need to buy her some time. You set an ambush—hit the sons of bitches three, four miles down the road.”

  Yates blinked. “Who? Where?”

  Ritzik pointed east. “Satellite says three trucks, four pickups. The TOC estimates we have about forty minutes—maybe as much as an hour.”

  “That’s not a lot of time.” The sergeant major’s face grew grim. He jerked his thumb toward the truck. “She needs more than that.”

  “I understand.”

  “Not a lot of alternatives either.” “Huh?”

  “We used up the claymores, Mike. We have Semtex, and a couple of boxes of grenades, and maybe a dozen RPG rounds—and that’s all, except small arms.”

  Ritzik said, “You could rig the Semtex—cook up a land mine.”

  Rowdy pulled at his mustache. “Maybe,” he said. “If I can come up with a way to shape the charges.” Ritzik said: “Just do it.”

  Sam Phillips blinked. “Take Chris—X-Man—with you. He was first in his class in car-bomb school.”

  Rowdy looked dubious. “Car-bomb school? Who the hell taught that, Hizballah?”

  “Close,” Sam said. “Fatah.”

  Rowdy’s eyes widened. “Give me a break.”

  “No—it’s the truth. X led one of the first teams to train the Palestinian National Authority as a part of the state-building security programs CIA ran in the mid-nineties. It was a result of the Oslo Accords. CIA contractors taught them crisis driving and VIP protection down in Lakeland, Florida. CIA employees taught countersurveillance, interrogation, secure comms—all the tradecraft they’d need to build a security/intel apparatus once they got their own Palestinian state—at a secure site in North Carolina.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Serious? This was approved at the highest levels,” Sam said. “Of course the Palestinians turned it all around. Instead of making peace with the Israelis, they used everything we’d taught them to wage war against ‘em.”

  “Well,” Rowdy said. “It is, after all, the Middle East.”

  “Precisely. Anyway, X-Man met this guy from Fatah who’d spent ten years in an Israeli jail for making bombs. He was known as the Engineer. He taught X the basics of his craft. In return, X gave him rudimentary edged-weapons training.”

  Rowdy said, “Throat slicing in exchange for car bombing. I like it. And all in the name of nation building.”

  “Are we a great country or what?” Sam said. “I mean—”

  “Hate to interrupt your history lesson, Sam,” Ritzik broke in. “But some of us gotta get to work.”

  0814. “Boss—” Mickey D loped over to where Ritzik stood listening intently to an update from the TOC. Ritzik’s hand went up in the pilot’s face like a traffic cop’s. “Hold a sec.”

  Ritzik nodded. “Roger that. Loner out.” The news was not good. The Chinese were airborne. Judging from the overhead, they were loaded for bear. He focused on the warrant officer. “What’s up?”

  Mickey D jerked his thumb in HIP One’s direction. “It’s flyable, if not quite landable. But if I set it down gently, we might just walk away.”

  The chopper was an option he hadn’t considered until now. Ritzik stared at the chopper, his brain spinning. There was no way they’d outrun the Chinese—not HIND gun-ships anyway. Mustache Man and the IMU were closing fast. And Wei-Liu had disassembled enough of the MADM to make it nigh on impossible to move it. Three nasty balls in the air. The question was, which one to shoot first.

  That wasn’t hard. The way Ritzik saw it, the most pressing problem was buying Wei-Liu sufficient time to get her job done. Once she’d rendered the device safe, they could all get the hell out of Dodge and scramble over the Tajik border. That was where SECDEF had told him to go. Rockman had passed the word to the TOC that there was a Special Forces training element in Dushanbe and the president was scrambling them. The SF people would move by chopper to Tokhtamysh. There, they’d be put on backchannel comms to Ritzik’s TOC in Almaty. If he could just make it across the border, they’d be waiting for him. But the training group was an overt unit. They couldn’t come get him. Their ROEs didn’t allow them to violate Chinese sovereignty.

  So he had to buy Wei-Liu time. And the best way to do that was to take the battle to the enemy. From what Sam Phillips had been able to decipher from listening in on the Chinese, the PLA element in Kashgar understood that two of their HIPs had come under fire from a large IMU element. That gave Ritzik a tactical advantage—albeit a slim one. “What’s the fuel situation?”

  “External tank is about half full. Internal tanks are virtually topped off.”

  “How much time does that give us?”

  “Fuel’s about eighteen hundred liters. That translates into just over two hours of flight time.”

  Ritzik nodded. “What about the other chopper? Can we bleed fuel out of it?”

  “If there’s a dry bladder tank in the stowage compartment behind the cockpit. I haven’t checked, but if there is one and it wasn’t shot up, we could use it to siphon avgas and top off the external on HIP One.”

  “There’s no time for that now,” Ritzik said. “But I’ll get some people on it.” He turned. “Rowdy—”

  The burly sergeant major fishhooked. “Yo.”

  “Check on the fuel situation. I’m going to take the chopper. We’ll go after the IMU force. What I’m hoping to do is make enough noise to get the Chinese coming out of Kashgar involved—draw them away from you.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “You guys stay here—most important thing is to give the lady time to work on the weapon.”

  “Roger that.” The sergeant major gave the area a quick once-over. “Y’know, Loner, maybe we could make it look like the PLA won this one.”

  “Great idea. If you go that route, you’ll have to move the nuke,” Ritzik said. “As soon as she does whatever she has to—bare minimum—get the damn MADM out of the truck. Camouflage it—give her space to work, but keep the damn thing out of sight. Flip the truck if you can. Burn it. And set the chopper off, too—once you drain the avgas.”

  “Can do. We’ll make it look like this was the IMU advance party—and it was decimated.”

  Ritzik said, “Hide the 4x4. You can’t let ‘em see it, Rowdy—not a hint.” He pointed up the slope. “Set up defensive positions—improvise a couple of shaped charges and set ‘em. But don’t initiate anything unless they’re about to overrun you.” He looked at the sergeant major. “Oh, hell, Rowdy, you’ve forgotten more about this than I’ll ever know.”

  “Roger that, Loner.”

  “But get everybody home. In case things go south and we don’t make it back, you take the 4x4 and get everybody out—Tajikistan.”

  “You’ll c
ome away just fine.”

  “Maybe. But the bottom line is evade and escape, Rowdy. No tracks, no evidence.” Ritzik took in Sam Phillips’s skeptical expression. “Look, I figure if Mick and I can shift the Chinese eastward—where Mustache Man is coming from—we can focus the PLA on them, instead of us.”

  “Since you like long odds I have a real estate proposition you might be interested in,” Sam said. “A seaside hotel and health spa in Chechnya—it’s a Red Roof Inn, run by real Reds. The saunas are all heated with napalm. I can let you have it for thirty cents on the dollar.”

  “Okay, so I believe in Santa Claus, too,” Ritzik said. “You have a better idea?”

  The CIA officer’s face grew serious. “No.” He shrugged. “Actually I don’t.” He looked at Ritzik. “Let me come with you. I’d like a crack at Mustache Man.”

  Mickey D said, “Boss, I’ll need a second pair of hands in the cockpit.”

  Ritzik looked at the spook. Finally, he said, “You could work the radio—translate.”

  Sam shrugged. “Anything you need.”

  Ritzik focused on the sergeant major. “I want to take Ty with me. And one more to help crew the chopper.”

  Yates said, “Take Gino.”

  “Good.” Ritzik scanned the cloudless sky. “Rowdy—” “Loner?”

  Ritzik’s face was a mask. “You do what you have to. Whatever it takes.”

  “Wilco.” Yates’s expression told Ritzik the message had been received.

  Ritzik turned to the pilot. “Mick, let’s go hunting. Get the bird ready to fly.”

  24

  125 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.

  0824 Hours Local Time.

  MICKEY D STRAPPED HIMSELF into the pilot’s seat. Sam Phillips pulled the shoulder straps tight and attached them to the waist belt. Then the spook reached down, plucked the big headset off the console, and clamped it around his ears. Ritzik and Gene Shepard held on to the flight-deck support struts, watching as the pilot’s left hand used the collective control to add throttle and increase the pitch of the HIP’s rotor blades. The ravine filled with sand and loose brush as the twin turboshafts increased thrust and the six blades began to bite the morning air.

  The HIP raised itself, shaking wildly as the broken gear cleared. Mickey D fought the controls. The ravine walls were the problem. The steep incline created unnatural turbulence. The rotors weren’t getting enough air, and the HIP didn’t want to lift off—and if it did, there was a good chance he’d slam back groundward. He eased the chopper back onto the ground, listing dangerously to port. Dammit, the big chopper was out of balance. There was at least two hundred kilos more weight on the starboard side, where the external fuel tank hung.

  Mickey D tried to remember what the side clearance for a HIP was, and drew a blank. Well, if he had a hundred feet of clearance on either side, he’d be okay. He looked to port and starboard. Not close.

  “You guys get your asses aft,” Mickey D shouted. “Help me balance this thing out.”

  “Roger.” Ritzik hand-signaled Gene Shepard, and the two of them edged aft, to where Ty Weaver had strapped himself and his big sniper rifle into port-side seats. The aircraft rose once more, lifting jerkily. The first sergeant found one of the crew safety harnesses, shrugged into it, and fastened it securely. Ritzik stopped amidships, holding on to a bulkhead strut with his right hand. His left pointed toward three boxes of machine-gun ammunition, stowed against the starboard bulkhead. “Let’s move this.”

  Ritzik had already started for the opposite side of the cabin when the HIP rolled violently to port, corrected, and shot vertically twenty yards into the air. He was tossed clean off his feet and catapulted toward the open door. Shepard, strapped in, one-handed the shoulder strap on Ritzik’s body armor before he pitched out the hatch. The lanky soldier dragged Ritzik aft, found a safety harness, and attached it to him.

  Then the three of them got to work. There was one seven-hundred-round ammo box already attached to the machine-gun arm, the belted rounds positioned in the feed tray. Ty secured the weapon, which was swinging freely on its pintle arm, while Ritzik and Gino unstrapped the two additional ammo boxes, dragged them port, and secured them where they’d be easy to reach using webbing attached to the canvas troop seats.

  Ritzik saw something strapped down across two of the rearmost seats. He clambered aft and found the RPG launcher and three rockets that the first sergeant had brought aboard. Jeezus H. Kee-rist. Unless it was fired at just the right angle, the backblast would bring the HIP down like a rock. Ritzik started to say something, but Shepard cut him off. “Don’t worry, Loner—I got it all figured out.”

  The big chopper’s nose tilted down now. As the aircraft rose into the morning sky, Mickey D increased the cyclic pitch so that as the rotor blades passed over the tail of the aircraft, they chewed more air than they did when they passed over the nose. The chopper flew forward, circling slowly.

  Ritzik looked down through the open doorway. He could see his people moving purposefully, stripping the downed HIP, carrying equipment, setting explosives. They were, Ritzik noted, doing what they did best: soldiering. For an instant, it flashed across his mind that he might not see any of them again. But that’s the way it was. At the compound, you never knew if the brother-in-arms you had a cup of coffee with at zero six hundred, and who departed for Beirut, Lima, Kinshasa, or Kashgar at thirteen hundred would make it back. Delta operators were consummate warriors; the best-trained, most highly motivated shooters in the world. They were comfortable with themselves, and with their abilities, confident they could prevail in any situation, anywhere. But in the end, you could never really know how events would play out. That existential uncertainty was something people like Ritzik accepted; an integral part of their life’s equation. You assumed it like a mantle when you were accepted into the Unit. It was a fundamental part of the equipment—both physical and psychological—that you carried every time you left on an assignment.

  Ritzik caught a glimpse of Rowdy clambering over the tailgate of the big truck. They hadn’t said good-bye. They wouldn’t have. Good-byes weren’t a part of their lexicon the way greetings were. And then the chopper banked away, Mick turned east, the HIP flew into the sun, keeping a steady three hundred feet above the ridgeline, and Ritzik lost sight of them all.

  132 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.

  0829 Hours Local Time.

  THERE WAS NO USE trying to talk—there was far too much engine noise. Ritzik looked to see if there were any headsets in the cabin, but found none. So he tapped Gino’s body armor, pointed at the machine gun, and mimed firing it.

  The first sergeant nodded in the affirmative. His big gloved hands opened the feed cover to make sure the heavy rounds had been seated in the tray correctly. He slapped the cover closed, dropped the operating handle downward, and pulled it to the rear, then eased it forward. He flipped the machine gun’s rear sight up, unstrapped the arm, sighted, flicked the safety downward, and squeezed the trigger, loosing a six-round burst earthward. Shepard stuck out his lower lip as if to say, Not bad, and gave Ritzik an upturned thumb.

  Ty pulled the rifle out of its case. He crossed the cabin, unlatched the starboard-side door, and slid it aft, ramming it home and securing the safety strap.

  Ritzik made his way forward, stuck his head through the flight-deck hatchway, and squeezed Mickey D’s shoulder. The pilot turned his head toward Ritzik. “We’re stable,” he shouted. “Gonna be okay.”

  “Good.” Ritzik pointed through the windshield. “Follow the road,” he shouted. “You’ll see them soon—they’re about twelve miles behind us.”

  “You got it.”

  “But don’t get close. Stand off a few miles. I want to wait for the Chinese.” He leaned toward Sam. “Anything out of Kashgar?”

  “Negatory.”

  “Keep listening. I’m going to check the TOC.” He rapped the spook’s shoulder. “Headset?”

  Mickey D jerked his head sideways. �
�Sam—it’s by my left leg.”

  The spook reached over and fumbled next to the pilot’s calf and came up with one. Ritzik pulled the big muffs on over his radio headset to mask the engine noise. He slipped back into the cabin, pulled a troop seat down, and dropped into it. “TOC, Loner.”

  “Lo … OC.”

  Ritzik repeated the call sign. But all he got out of the frigging radio was static. He stood up, made his way aft, secured himself close to the open doorway, and tried once, twice, thrice again without result.

  And then, after fifteen seconds of ominous, infuriating silence, Dodger’s voice blasted into his head. “Loner, TOC.”

  Ritzik exhaled. He fumbled in his cargo pocket, brought the GPS unit out, switched it on, and read out the HIP’s coordinates. “Can you give me a position for the Chinese?”

  He listened for a response from the TOC, then asked, “Speed?” Ritzik entered the information in his own unit, waited, then squinted at the small screen. “I get fifty-three minutes,” he said. “Please confirm.” Ritzik listened to the response. “Roger that.” Then he switched frequencies. “Rowdy, Loner. You have a fifty-three-minute countdown. Repeat: five-three-minute countdown. Please confirm.”

  125 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.

  0829 Hours Local Time.

  WEI-LIU WAS not having an easy time of it. And now, on top of everything, Rowdy’d just told her he had to move the damn device within the next couple of minutes and no, he couldn’t wait. Yet all she’d managed to do in just over a half hour was to disconnect the battery. And even that hadn’t been simple.

  The four nuts were corroded by acid, moisture—who knew what. It had taken every bit of her strength to loosen them from the bolts. She wasn’t worried about sparks because her tools were nonmagnetic. And she’d had four of the Delta Soldiers elevate the weapon so she could slide the thin, three-foot-square antistatic pad from her kit bag under the bomb. But between the energy field and static charges generated by the chopper as it took off, the sorry condition of the batteries, and the huge amount of energy still stored in the capacitors—with no way to drain them in this outdoor environment—the situation was still far more volatile than she would have liked.