The two guards were cold as well—one hunched over trying to retain body heat, the other rolled into a ball on the floor around the tie-down loop that restrained him. For two hours they had rumbled along through the night without challenge, and now the orange and pink glow streaking the eastern horizon was a welcome sight as Will came back once again to reassure them.
“We should be across in less than ten minutes now, and you want to make sure those seatbelts are fastened for landing.”
“Do we really have a chance to make it?” Shakir asked. “I expected they would chase us and try to shoot us down.”
Will shrugged. “Even if they know where we are, Shakir, all they can chase us with is another helicopter, and so far there’s been nothing.”
He returned to the cockpit then, glancing at the defiant door and deciding it wasn’t worth another struggle.
Shakir had kept one of the rifles by his side on the floor. It was safe there—out of reach of both soldiers, who, in any event, were harmless, shackled as they were to the floor.
An abrupt blur of movement on Shakir’s right caused his head to jerk suddenly in that direction. He saw the young soldier who had been lying in a ball on the floor leap forward like a tiger past Shakir, scoop up the rifle, and come to rest with his back against the forward left-hand corner of the cargo compartment, by the flight engineer’s station.
Within a heartbeat, Shakir found himself staring down the barrel of an automatic weapon, the unmistakable sound of the firing mechanism being cocked reaching his ears with chilling clarity.
The young soldier’s eyes were narrowed with determination, his right wrist still encircled by one side of the handcuffs, the carefully removed tie-down cleat dangling from the other end.
“Land this machine! NOW!” he yelled in Arabic at Shakir.
Saliah stifled a scream as she gathered the children closer around her. The youngest whimpered as he clutched his mother, too frightened to cry out.
Will heard the command and looked around from where he was standing to the left of the pilot’s seat in the cockpit, seeing only Shakir as he motioned for Will to stay where he was, speaking in English.
“One of the guards has broken loose and taken my gun. He wants us to land.”
That brought Doug to full attention. He and Will looked at each other, searching for split-second answers. Then Doug, reading Will’s thoughts, nodded once, smiled slightly, and turned back to concentrate on flying.
“Good luck, old buddy,” he said under his breath.
“LAND! NOW!” the soldier repeated, pushing the barrel of the gun at Shakir with each word. His eyes kept darting to the left toward the cockpit entrance, bracing for a challenge.
Will grabbed one of the other guns from alongside the pilot’s seat and checked the safety as he analyzed the situation.
There was no way even to see the soldier from the cockpit without coming back, which would put Will in the line of fire before he had a chance to raise his gun.
There was only one solution apparent. The soldier would have to be moved.
Will was on his feet now beside the pilot’s seat and facing backwards. He leaned over and spoke directly in Doug’s ear.
“Can you bank suddenly to the right and then stand this thing on its tail? You know, a sudden nose-high deck angle?”
“We can try.”
Will caught Shakir’s eyes and described with his hands what was about to happen. To his relief, Shakir merely blinked twice with a neutral expression.
Doug yanked the cyclic stick to the right then and kicked the left rudder pedal. The helicopter rolled to the right and gravity went with it, propelling the soldier unceremoniously against the middle of the partially opened door as Doug pulled back just as suddenly on the stick, the Hind’s blades protesting with mighty slapping noises as the nose of the chopper rose suddenly to a steep nose-up deck angle.
The soldier had tried to get to his feet after hitting the door but the floor wouldn’t cooperate. With his sense of balance out of service, he flailed the air for something to hold on to as he tumbled backwards, his foot inadvertently kicking Shakir’s hand as he rolled by—dislodging the canister Shakir had been holding.
Soldier and canister now ended up in confusion against the rear bulkhead of the cargo compartment as Will emerged from the cockpit, rifle raised and aimed, safety off. The helicopter was pitching forward again, picking up speed as Will braced himself on the slippery metal floor, acutely aware of the yawning hole to his left. The main sliding door was now almost two-thirds open and a clear danger, and Will fumbled for a solid handhold as Shakir’s voice reached his ears.
“Don’t shoot! He’s got the canister! We can’t take a chance that a bullet might hit it!”
The words didn’t make sense, though the tone of voice did, and Shakir read the confusion on Will’s face as he realized he had yelled in Arabic.
The soldier, however, understood instantly. Whatever was in that silver canister was important to these thieves. He scooped it up then and held it against the muzzle of the gun, realizing he now held all the aces.
“LAND NOW, OR I WILL SHOOT THIS!”
One hundred twenty miles north of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the radar displays aboard the AWACS covering the Kuwait theater of operations confirmed that the fast-moving target that had popped up moments earlier from a marginally operational Iraqi air base northwest of Basrah was not a “friendly.” The transponder codes were all wrong, and it was going too fast to be a helicopter.
The sector controller calculated the time to intercept for the flight of four F-15s on combat air patrol and keyed his transmitter to turn them in that direction. Whoever was flying that Iraqi fighter had to know he was committing suicide—unless it was a defection.
The controller raised the possibility to his boss, who relayed it on up the line in a flash of telecommunication coordination as the F-15s turned to make a supersonic dash at the intruder, who was now within thirty miles of a Coalition forward base.
“There’s something else here.” The controller’s finger traced the slow-moving helicopter he had been monitoring for the past hour. It, too, seemed headed for the Coalition line, and the projected path of the fighter was aimed right at the rotorcraft.
In the cockpit of the Iraqi MiG-21, the thirty-four-year-old squadron commander twisted his head around again to check his six-o’clock position before turning his attention to the target. The slow-moving helicopter was doing a little over one hundred knots and he was closing on the target at over four hundred. It would be so easy if he just had a single air-to-air missile, but it had been all he could do to get the aircraft out of the bunker and launched with the guns armed.
The MiG shouldn’t even be flying, of course. It was one of the few that had too many maintenance problems to make the dash to Iran at the first of the air war. And there was the matter of the American Air Force fighters who would be sweeping down on him in minutes. He’d have to shoot the stolen helicopter out of the sky with his guns, then turn and run on afterburner to the nearest runway—or punch out before they blew him out of the sky.
His radar screen came alive suddenly with the indication he feared the most: someone’s fire-control radar was tracking him, and lock-on was imminent.
The smoke plumes from the hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells the departing Iraqis had set ablaze were now visible in the windscreen ahead as Doug looked over his shoulder again at the standoff in the cargo compartment. The soldier had been dislodged once, but he’d learned his lesson. He was propped against the rear bulkhead now, with his feet wedged against the sidewall seat stanchions, holding the rifle muzzle to the canister and yelling periodically in Arabic, which Shakir kept translating with increasing alarm.
“I think he means it! I think we’d better land!” Shakir yelled at Will, who was trying to keep the bead of his gun on the Iraqi’s forehead and calculating whether shooting might cause his trigger finger to twitch.
It was too great a chance.
Will felt himself hit the ceiling and lose control of the gun as the helicopter now lurched upward to meet him, combining with gravity to knock the wind out of him, the rifle clattering toward the open door where it hesitated for what seemed like a lazy few seconds before tumbling out toward the predawn desert below.
Shakir’s family had been belted in, and fared better than Shakir, who hit the ceiling too, then came down hard on his wife’s lap.
The soldier had worked his feet into an immovable position before the upset. Suddenly his body was being sent to places his feet could not follow, and he found himself slammed back into the deck with two broken ankles before being rolled forward past his comrade toward the open door, his grip on the rifle lost—his grip on the canister firm.
Shakir saw what was happening and lunged from the sidewall seat toward the outstretched hand of the soldier, grabbing for the canister as the helicopter rolled to the right, still canted nose-down, the soldier concentrating for a critical split second on the pain in his ankles, failing to realize he was sliding backward inexorably toward the maw of the open door.
Shakir’s hand swept toward the canister, but missed. He gathered his knees under him and tried to propel himself forward as the soldier’s legs slid over the edge of the door and the man clawed for a handhold with his free hand. Once again the canister was inches away but unreachable.
Shakir’s mind shifted its personal time-base to high speed now as he analyzed the deteriorating situation. If he made a final lunge for the canister, he could propel himself right out the door with it, which would accomplish nothing. If he didn’t lunge, it was gone. The soldier’s hips were now sliding into the slipstream as he flailed for something to hold onto, finding only the slick metal floor and the rounded edge of the doorjamb itself.
There was no choice.
Shakir gathered his left foot under him and launched himself toward the right forward corner of the cargo compartment, his hand grabbing the soldier’s arm as the man went fully over the edge with a scream of surprise, his arm and wrist and hand progressively slipping through Shakir’s grasp until only the canister was left behind in Shakir’s hands.
Now Shakir’s body was rolling toward the door, and somewhere in the background he heard Saliah scream.
The Hind was still rolled to the right, though the steep deck angle was coming back up as Doug pulled on the cyclic and tried to catch a glimpse of the fighter that had caused the upset.
Shakir’s feet were hanging on to the edge of the open sliding door. His right hand held the canister, his left the forward door-jamb, and his body straddled the gap—a thousand-foot plunge awaiting the slightest slip.
Will had recovered enough to get to his knees and grab a handle on the forward bulkhead with his left hand as he reached out with his right in an attempt to capture Shakir’s arm and at least stabilize him, but Shakir slapped the canister into Will’s right hand instead.
Shakir held on now with both hands to the forward doorjamb, his fingers curling around the lip of it, the sharp metal beginning to cut his flesh.
“Doug!” Will yelled forward without looking. There was one chance, and as Will hoped, Doug looked around.
“What?”
“I’m throwing the canister forward.”
Will let his right arm and hand accelerate the canister gently into the cockpit, the silver container seeming to hang in the air as it passed through the opening and clattered onto the floor, rolling forward toward the weapon operator’s compartment before coming to a stop.
Will grabbed a handle on the right side of the bulkhead, closer to the door, as he yelled again at Doug. “Roll left! Roll back to the left!”
In the time it took for Doug to respond, Shakir’s feet slipped off the edge of the sliding door and the door slid fully open. Will saw Shakir’s body swing into the windstream then as his hands held on to the forward doorjamb, pivoting around its sharp edge as Will reached for Shakir’s left forearm and caught it.
The weight was incredible. Will was in good condition, but Shakir was an immovable dead weight on his hand and arm. He could barely hang on, let alone haul him inside, and he could feel Shakir’s grip on the doorjamb slipping. He saw crimson around Shakir’s hands, the bleeding making the metal slippery and loosening his grip even more.
Shakir’s left hand slid off first, and Will used every ounce of strength he had to haul in on his forearm, which slipped out of his grip until he was hanging on to a wrist—and that too was slipping.
Shakir was looking up, trying to pull himself in with his right hand but not succeeding. Will could see his fingers loosening on the doorjamb. It would be a matter of seconds until all his weight would hang from Will’s right hand.
Pull, goddammit! Will yelled to himself, giving one last grand effort to yank Shakir in at the same moment Doug glanced behind, assessed the situation, and rolled the Hind to the left sharply.
Shakir catapulted back in the door and into Will, knocking them both into the left side of the cargo compartment.
“Strap in!” Will yelled at him, watching as Shakir dove for the seat next to Saliah and did exactly that as she enfolded him in her arms, her eyes wide with terror.
Will pulled himself up to the left seat and strapped in as Doug pivoted the machine around to the north, his eyes locking in on the smoke trail of the fighter, his mind working the problem of identification down to a chilling conclusion.
“Jesus Christ, Will, I think that’s a MiG-21!”
The fighter was rolling out on a head-on course now and closing, the black smoke from its engine indicating it was accelerating.
“If he’s got missiles, we’re dead,” Will said calmly.
“If he had and he’s chasing us, he would have used them. He’s coming in on a strafing run.”
A tentative few flashes of light from the MiG’s wing roots underscored Doug’s fears as tracers from the small squeeze of bullets passed just beneath them. Doug could see the nose of the MiG adjusting the shot.
“Doug—”
“I know!” Doug’s hand was already pulling on the collective and cyclic simultaneously, causing the helicopter to pop up suddenly in the fighter’s perspective as it slowed. They could see the MiG pilot adjusting even more and waited for him to do so before Doug fairly yanked the cyclic to the right as he pressed hard on the rudder pedals and dumped the collective, causing the helicopter to spiral down to the right suddenly with a sickening sink rate.
Once again the MiG’s target was out of the cross hairs, and this time he was within three miles and closing fast.
Another stream of tracers snaked by on the left as Doug dove to the right and then reversed direction, climbing and banking back to the left as the MiG pilot struggled to follow, his bullets still wide of the mark.
The fighter shot past on the left as Doug pirouetted and followed, accelerating as fast as he dared, knowing that even at one hundred fifty they were no match for the MiG’s speed.
“Where the hell are our guys?” Doug yelled.
“We’re an Iraqi helicopter being attacked by an Iraqi fighter. You think our guys are going to help? This looks like civil-war stuff. We’re on our own!” Will yelled back.
“Then get up there and figure out that minigun. We’ve got to fight back.”
I’ve got to hover. I’ve got to hover this baby and keep screwing up his shot, Doug decided.
Will was clambering beneath the cockpit now toward the nose gunner’s position, and within seconds Doug could see his head appear in the Plexiglas in fr
ont of the cockpit bubble as he searched for the cocking and firing mechanisms.
The MiG was turning back toward them again as Doug pulled on the cyclic and increased the collective and the power, bringing in some compensating rudder as he slowed under fifty now and started flying in a speed range reserved mainly for helicopters.
I’m overcontrolling again!
Almost immediately the Hind became a beast, wanting to gyrate in every direction at once and defying Doug’s attempts to hover.
He estimated his altitude now at a thousand feet, and as the MiG rolled out on course and wings level some five miles distant, Doug waited for the right moment to slam the collective to the floor and literally drop out of the MiG’s sights.
The fighter was steady on course now and aiming straight for them. The pilot would be fingering the trigger and waiting for the right moment. Doug could see Will’s head still bobbing around up ahead, meaning he still didn’t have the gun figured out.
NOW!
Doug’s left hand slammed the collective into negative pitch, feeling the bottom fall out from beneath his stomach as they suddenly accelerated toward the desert floor with almost no forward flying speed.
A crowd was gathering rapidly four miles to the south at the American encampment. The sight of a Soviet-built helicopter in an apparent duel with a Soviet-built fighter was amazing and entertaining at the same time. As the GIs watched, messages were being radioed for assistance in case it portended an attack on the base, and antiaircraft batteries were being brought to bear on the potential intruders.
Aboard Crown, the reports of the duel were coming from ground observers and reaching incredulous ears. It did indeed look like a defection of some sort, but who was defecting?
“Probably the chopper. I’ve been watching him come steadily south for an hour. The other guy was probably launched to get him,” the duty controller told his commander as they watched the F-15s streaking into the battle scene now only four minutes out.
Scorpion Strike Page 34
