It was difficult but not impossible to operate the AC-130 gunship with only four people on board.
The plane could be flown by one person; two were required only for landings and takeoffs, and maybe not even then. And the plane's vital signs could be monitored on a periodic basis instead of having one person dedicated to that one job. And if the ECM suite was not in use, there was no reason to have a body praying over that either.
It was the aircraft's massive weaponry that needed the manpower.
The good thing was all three miniguns and the howitzer were computer-guided, computer-aimed, and computer-fired, as were their rearming systems. The bad thing was, the four remaining members of the ArcLight's flight crew—the pilot, copilot, flight engineer, and loadmaster—were Air Force guys. Not one of them had the computer knowledge needed to fire the guns.
But together, the four of them had been able to cook up a way to get the weapons to fire semi-manually. In effect they had rigged a system whereby the guns would fire on a timed command—and that command could be sent by the pilot when he was able to get the plane into position above their next target.
In order to do this, though, they had been forced to erase a large portion of the weapon computer's original firing commands, along with a ton of secondary and backup commands.
But what difference did that make?
As far as they were concerned, this would be the last time they would be operating the gunship.
At this time tomorrow, they would be gone—pockets full of money—to places unknown.
They just had to hit this one last target.
*****
That target was now just five minutes away.
It was ironic that they had been vectored to this part of Iraq. Years before, the gunship had flown this sector many times looking for SCUDs or other targets of opportunity. As they flew over these familiar parts once again, it was almost as if the aircraft recognized its old turf. There were the Tajji Mountains over there. The Samarra dry river over there. The valley known as Tawiq Cha was over there. And out on the horizon, coming into range soon, was the air base, now abandoned, known as El-Saad Men.
The main hangar stuck out like a sore thumb. It was the only building standing in the ten-year-old rubble of the base, the only structure that could be identified so quickly from ten thousand feet.
Upon seeing it, the pilot lowered the gunship's altitude to 3,500 feet in a hurry, putting the ArcLight into a dive so severe the other three crewmen had to hold on for dear life. But it was a jovial plunge—one last time on the Space Hog roller coaster.
Inside of sixty seconds, the airplane was in position over the hangar. There was even a large arrow painted on its rooftop. It couldn't have made a better bull's-eye.
"OK there's your mark," the pilot called back to his "rookie" gunners. "Let's do a half-rotation, thirty-second burst with the minis. Then we'll go around again and try the popgun."
The three men in the rear weapons bay radioed ahead that they got the order. Now they had to see whether their jerry-rigged computer command would work. They felt the pilot dip the plane's left wing. Looking out the window, they could at last see the hangar themselves.
"OK, let's give it a shot," one said.
The second man did a mock sign of the cross and hit a button—just one of many on the firing panels connected to the three-minigun setup. There was a slight delay—almost too long. But then an amber light blinked on, indicating the pilot had punched in his timed-sequence command.
Five seconds later, to their great surprise, the three miniguns opened up full force.
The noise was sudden and the vibration so intense, it nearly knocked all three men on their rears. But they were laughing at the same time.
"It worked!" two yelled at once. "The fucking guns worked!"
"What did we need those other nine assholes for all this time!" the third joked.
Meanwhile, the miniguns were doing their deadly task. It was strange, but the worst vantage point to see how the target was faring was from the back of the gun- ship itself—especially in the first few seconds of a sequence. But as the airplane began to move around its semicircle and the three streams of fire combined into one and formed an arc, the rookie gunners could see at last the storm of lead tearing up the hangar with routinely chilling efficiency.
At the end of the thirty-second fusillade, the pilot twisted the airplane level again and called back for an assessment. The gunners looked out and saw that half the hangar was literally blown away and the other half was on fire. "Must have been a secondary within," one man yelled ahead to the cockpit.
The pilot laughed at this joke, and then brought the airplane down to 1500 feet.
"Let's fire up the popgun," he said, referring to the howitzer. "We'll use up whatever shells are left in the chamber feed and then get the hell out of here."
The gunners did as told. They hit a separate timed order for the howitzer, and soon it was firing away with its usual swooshing noise.
The streams of artillery shells made a longer arc than the miniguns. They exploded with great flare on impact, the result of their high-explosive warheads. It took but another twenty seconds—and 21 shells—to obliterate the rest of the hangar.
Then the pilot called back the cease-fire order. Then he straightened the airplane out again.
He looked out his side window and saw that where the huge hangar had stood just two minutes before, now was a raging fire encompassing a pile of rubble. Nothing inside, man or metal, could survive that, he knew.
Of course, he'd seen it all before.
"Good job, boys," he called back to the firing cabin. "Let's go home."
*****
There was a sense of gaiety inside the cockpit of the AC-130 gunship now.
The aircraft had settled in at 5,500 feet in altitude and had reached its cruising speed of two hundred knots. The heavy plane was much easier to handle now because of all the ammunition just expended. In fact, the ride home was always smoother—and satisfying too. After a successful mission, it was always a pleasant feeling to go home with an empty belly.
All this was something they might eventually miss, the four crewmen had mused earlier. After ten years, the old habits would be hard to break. But they had little to complain about. Eight years of living in luxury at Zim's Hotel; another two fixing up and then flying the great gunship again. The money had been good. The food great; the booze better.
With just one day left, they only had one real regret. If only they had been able to score some women along the way . . .
But little did they know that this perverse tour of duty was coming to an end sooner than they thought.
*****
The first indication that something was not right came from the crew's flight engineer. He'd been relaxing at his station, feet up, eyes closed, fighting off sleep.
Suddenly the radio in front of him burst to life with a howl of static. It jolted the engineer back to reality. His radio panel was lighting up like a Christmas tree. Red lights, green lights, blue ones too. All of them blinking madly.
"What the fuck?"
Then came some shouting. The loadmaster was trying to yell something up to the flight deck. The engineer took his eyes off his equipment, looked down into the weapons bay, and saw his colleague at the side window pointing at something off their left wing.
A moment later the engineer heard the copilot swear.
"Jeesuz . . . What the fuck is . . . ?"
That was when the airplane started bucking; it was so bad at first, the engineer had to hold on. The plane straightened out a bit a few seconds later, but the engineer could detect a wave of tension suddenly crackling through the ship.
He unstrapped, made his way back to the weapons bay window, and finally saw what all the commotion was about.
It was a helicopter, riding no more than twenty-five feet off their left wing. It was pale brown and red, with a strange bubble nose and long tail section. It was a two-man aircraft, but only one person could be seen on board. It was painted in Iraqi markings, but the pilot was definitely not an Iraqi. He clearly had red hair and a Caucasian complexion. In fact, he looked like an old-time cowboy. What kind of helicopter was it? The engineer didn't know one chopper from the other, but he believed this thing was a Russian-built Hind.
But what was it doing out there? It was so close to their wing, one wrong move and they would surely collide with it. And the way its pilot was flying seemed crazy. The chopper was all over the sky, going up and down, back and forth, flashing its nav lights wildly. The pilot himself was particularly animated. He was waving his arms, giving them the finger, and seemed to be shouting something at them. There was only one word describe his bizarre behavior: He was
taunting
them.
The engineer quickly climbed up to the flight deck, and now both pilots were looking out at the strange chopper.
"Who the hell is
this
guy?" the copilot was yelling. His name was Pete Jones.
"Beats me," the engineer replied. "But he skewered the comm set, he came up on us so fast."
Jones turned to the man riding in the AC-130's other control seat. This was Colonel Jeff Woods, the buzz-cut John Glenn lookalike.
"What'll we do, Woodsie?" Jones asked him.
Woods looked out at the chopper and then settled back into his seat.
"Well, let's see if you boys can shoot him down," he said calmly.
It took about a minute and a half to power up the three miniguns again; they'd all been shut down at the completion of the attack on the hangar at
El-Saad Men air base.
Now the flight engineer and the loadmaster struggled to push the right panels and flip the right switches and reboot the right computers. Somehow, ninety seconds later, the weapons systems all came on-line.
The strange chopper had cooperated in this endeavor by not for a moment diverting from its strange behavior. It was still riding off the left wing, still flying in a weirdly provocative manner.
The ArcLight's makeshift gun crew was now facing an unusual situation. The orders from the flight deck said shoot the asshole down, so that was what they were going to try to do. But the miniguns were designed mainly to fuck up big targets on the ground. Hardened stuff, troops concentrations, general populations. Static stuff. Things that were standing still.
Shooting down another C-130 had taken some finesse. Could they really nail something relatively small and agile as a chopper?
They would soon find out. . . .
*****
It was just fate that Colonel Woods was riding in the copilot's slot when all this happened.
He and Jones usually switched off and on for piloting missions. This particular day it had been Woods's time at the stick, but after the attack on El-Saad Men was through, they had switched seats.
So for this curious engagement, Woods was relegated to observer status. Jones would have to try and keep the gunship steady while the two men in back fired on the mysterious helicopter. For this, the copilot's seat had the worst vantage point. Woods couldn't see the chopper, nor would he be able to see the guns when they went off. He really could do little else but sit back and just listen to what was going on.
That was why it was so strange then that he happened to glance out at the right wing and saw someone staring back in at him.
He nearly crapped his pants. It was another helicopter—another Hind. It was flying so close to the right side of the airplane, Woods could see the pilot looking in at him, not twenty-five feet away. The guy was handsome—almost like a movie star.
Woods tried to cough out a warning or something, but everyone else on the plane was concerned with the wacky chopper off their left wing, the side where the miniguns were located. So Wood just sat there for an instant or two, gaping at the second helicopter and wondering whether he was seeing things.
And in this odd stupor he saw the chopper get even closer. At the same time he watched as the chopper pilot opened the little side panel window on the Hind's cockpit. Then he saw the pilot sticking something out of the window.
Then he saw a tremendous burst of light—it was a muzzle flash from a gigantic pistol.
The huge bullet shattered the AC-130's right-side glass panel and struck Woods square on the temple. He felt the bullet enter his skull and explode his cranium outward. More shots were fired. The airplane's control panel was suddenly coming apart. Then Woods looked down and saw blood falling in great splats on his lap, on his knees, and all over the steering column.
Then he saw nothing but red.
Then nothing but black . . .
*****
Zim was reading a copy of
The Wall Street Journal
when Major Qank showed up with the bad news.
The doors to the great chamber opened, but in a grand lapse of protocol, Qank did not come in on his knees. In fact he strode in, very quickly, and walked right up to Zim's mound of pillows. His teeth were clenched.