Cody's Army (30 page)

She groaned as she tried to move and bit her lip until blood came. She pulled herself up to the top of the small rise, where
she could serve as a rear guard. Ahead fifty yards she saw the big American and two men who had joined him. They charged forward.

She triggered two six-round bursts at them, then edged lower as the return-fire came. She rose and fired again, felt bullets
whip past her, and then they were gone.

Two minutes, she told herself. Farouk needed another two minutes to make sure the engine would not quit on takeoff. No one
fired at the chopper now. She had pinned down the riflemen!

She fired and ducked and fired again, then she pushed in her last magazine. The Americans were up and moving ahead to another
spot of protection. She fired until she had only two rounds left.

Tahia struggled to stand on the rise. She put the submachine gun to her chest and screamed, “For the Glory of Allah!” She
pulled the trigger.

Cody saw the Arab woman fall just as the terrorist chopper lifted off the sand like some giant, bloated, metal insect.

He jerked the radio from his pocket, flipping the transmit switch.

“Rufe, come in fast!”

“Yeah, Sarge?”

“Did you see that other chopper, the one here behind the mansion? Come in here and pick me up pronto. I’ve got to go after
whoever is in that bird!”

“Roger that. Give me twenty seconds.”

When the chopper came in it kicked up a storm of dust and sand. Cody ran through it and opened the pilot’s door.

“Out, Rufe, this one is mine! See you back at the top of the hill.”

Rufe bailed out and stood there while Cody jumped in the chopper, fastened his belt, put the two Uzis on the co-pilot’s seat
beside him and lifted off.

TWENTY-SIX

I
t took him almost two minutes to spot the yellow copter among the barren hillsides and steep ravines below, and when he found
it, almost at once one of the Israeli jets made a harassing attack on the terrorist chopper, slamming past it at 600 miles
an hour, rocking it in the turbulence, giving Cody time to catch up.

He checked the line of flight the yellow bird took, and slanted cross-country to cut him off. The jet made another pass, firing
a rocket near the bird, but not hitting it.

When he lifted over the next rise he saw the militia chopper just ahead of him and in range. He found the firing button and
tried to line up his sights on the swaying helicopter. His first rocket fired but missed.

That shot let the pilot of the other bird know someone was on his tail, and he took evasive action, dropped into a narrow
ravine and slammed along dangerously close to the rocky walls of the canyon.

He took a deep breath and followed, but could not get lined up for another shot. He checked the YZ-24s pods and had only one
rocket left.

They came out of the gully into a wide valley, and the other bird climbed rapidly. In thirty seconds of dogfighting, Cody
realized the yellow chopper was faster and more maneuverable than his.

Then the yellow bird was gone. He looked around and almost too late saw him coming in from the side for a perfect shot. Cody
dumped his bird lower, but felt the impact as the small rocket blasted in the air and rained hot shrapnel through the YZ-24.
He held his breath to listen, but the engine sounded the same. No real damage.

He swung upward and away, now the hunted instead of the hunter, wound into a valley, then lifted over a small rise and checked
behind him. His radio talked.

“Easy, Cody chopper, he almost nailed you,” the jet pilot watching the fight said. “Want me to assist?”

“Only if I can’t get him. I owe this guy. If I buy it, you nail the S.O.B.”

“Roger. Here he comes again.”

Cody worked his controls, bucking the chopper to the left, diving toward the desert hills, sure his landing gear was going
to scrape the outcropping before he could pull up, but the maneuver forced the yellow bird off his tail.

He pivoted his chopper and raced head-on at the yellow flyer. For a moment he had a target, then the other pilot, who must
have spotted him coming, dove to the side.

Cody went with him and got off his last shot from the rocket pod. The round barely missed, slammed into rocks and acted almost
as an air burst on the enemy chopper, less than twenty yards from the rocks. The yellow bird limped away, but Cody was dry;
no more rockets, and the machine gun was out of rounds as well.

He saw a trail of smoke from the chopper and toward the other bird. It was plain now that the yellow craft was not operating
at full potential. He caught it easily and pulled in behind it. He pushed the Uzi out the open doorway but could not get in
the right position to fire. His chopper was a two-handed flyer. At last he got off a five-round burst, but the rounds went
wild as his own bird pitched and fell away.

He was tempted to call in the Israeli jet, but he had another idea. He pursued the yellow craft, maneuvering over it, then
dropped down and fired a burst of rounds through the top of the other craft.

It fell away to the left, as Cody guessed it would and he stayed right behind, sending another burst into its side, but evidently
not hitting anything vital. The chores of wars past enveloped him. Then the yellow chopper wheeled suddenly, and a man showed
in the open doorway with a AK-47 aimed directly at Cody, who dumped his chopper to the right and down, but not before he saw
the rifle bucking in the man’s hands.

Cody felt the rounds hit his craft up front. The marksman had aimed at the engine—and hit it. Cody felt his bird’s thrust
weaken, then the lift faded away as the rotor began turning slower, losing power.

Cody checked his altitude.

Three hundred feet.

Not high, unless you’re falling straight down with no power.

He rammed down the collective pitch-control lever that controlled the pitch of the rotors, flattening the blades, trying for
autorotation of the blades from the YZ-24’s downward momentum. As the chopper commenced a descending glide, the air from its
downward speed rushed up through the blades to keep them spinning. A glance at the tachometer told him the autorotation of
the blades was climbing in rpm’s, as he worked his chopper’s collective pitch-control level and the cyclic control stick.
He ripped back on the cyclic lever, with the Yugoslavian chopper descending with stomach-wrenching speed at less than fifty
feet from the ground.

The chopper nosed up sharply, then Cody shoved the cyclic forward again, and the YZ-24 slammed into the crash landing with
a shuddering crunch, the landing gear buckling powerfully. Then the rotors stopped.

The choppa-choppa of the terrorist bird returned overhead, hovering lower and longer than it should have, Cody decided, the
pilot probably right in guessing that most of the Israeli air cover was concerned with cleanup at the mansion and had not
traced them yet. The terrorist chopper must not have had any more ammunition or rockets either.

Play dead, Cody decided.

He sat there in his pilot’s seat with his head back, so he could see the other copier as it circled warily; then he saw it
come in closer yet and continue to hover.

When a rifle barrel appeared out that chopper’s door, Cody ended his death scene, grabbed the unsilenced Uzi and sent a stream
of parabellums at the yellow craft and saw the rifleman lunge out the door and topple in a deadfall to the ground 100 feet
below.

Cody used the final rounds in the Uzi to aim into the engine section of that chopper, and was rewarded with an abrupt plume
of black smoke and the winding-down sounds of the big rotor blades slowing.

The pilot of that craft knew what he was doing too, though, and he had been low enough so that he coasted his craft into a
patch of rocky clearing several hundred yards away from Cody’s downed bird.

Two dead choppers.

Now it was one on one.

Cody checked his magazines and found he still had two fresh ones. He took the unsilenced Uzi and slid out the far door opening,
away from the other bird. He lay behind the squat chopper and took stock of his ammo supply: sixty-four rounds in the two
magazines, plus whatever was left in the one in the weapon. No grenades. One four-inch fighting knife. That was it.

He watched the other downed bird.

It bounced slightly and Cody knew a man had left it. He switched his Uzi to single shot and began crawling through a slight
depression in the barren soil toward a deeper ravine.

He was twenty feet from the chopper when a grenade exploded, shattering the fuel tanks on his helicopter, erupting it into
an eye-searing fireball.

He hit the gully running, downhill, in the only direction the enemy could have moved, twenty yards to where he paused to lift
up to see over the lip of the ravine, to study the landscape in front of him: unrelieved desert hills. Scrub growth of some
kind.

He scanned the whole scene, watching for movement, then he took it in sections, dissecting every bush, every rock. He found
the man wearing a gray jacket and brown pants in the fourth section. He was about 150 yards away.

Cody lined up the Uzi, moved the selector to full auto and blasted twenty rounds into the spot where the terrorist lay. When
the jarring of the Uzi quieted, he watched the spot again. The man was gone; wounded, he hoped, but not dead. He surged to
his feet and raced twenty yards to a new ravine that zigzagged in the direction he wanted to go.

The heavy sound of the AK-47 on automatic fire thundered across the barren hills as Cody dove the last six feet into the ravine
and safety.

His enemy was alive.

His enemy had enough ammo to fire fully auto.

He ran hard along the arroyo for two hundred yards to where it leveled out, found a small rise to hide behind and again searched
for his prey. This time the man had concealed himself behind a large boulder. It was not quite big enough, and one leg and
a foot with a white running shoe on it extended to the side.

Cody worked forward out of the low place, moving swiftly from rock to rock, from cover to concealment. He was halfway across
the fifty yards of desert real-estate, when the shoe pulled back. Cody rested behind his own rock now, waiting for the first
shot. None came.

He picked out his cover carefully this time. He was not quite thirty yards from the terrorist. Ahead, the best protection
he could find was a small boulder fifteen yards out. No sweat. Just like the coach back at Princeton telling him to get fifteen
yards on a quarterback draw up the middle on a third and fifteen. He switched the Uzi to full auto again, and lifted up.

Behind the rock ahead, Farouk Hassan had not seen Cody. He knew he was out there somewhere. He massaged his knee, which was
on fire with pain. He had not counted on a helicopter pursuit.

He touched his left arm where three bullets had smashed the bones. He could barely lift it.

Firing a heavy AK-47 with one hand was hard. But he had to do it if he wanted to stay alive. He needed to look around the
rock, but he wasn’t sure if it would be safe. The American would be after him from that side, where the ravine ended. He shouldered
the weapon, held it in place and pushed the muzzle around the rock. When he looked out, he saw the American lift away from
his hiding spot and charge forward.

Farouk’s finger found the trigger and held it back until he saw the barrel begin to overheat and twist in protest. Then the
AK-47 jammed. He flung it aside, pulling a knife from his boot sheath.

Cody had seen the muzzle edge around the rock, but by then it was too late; he was committed to charging forward and in the
open. He darted to one side, then back and forward as the weapon fired on full auto ahead of him.

Hot lead tore into his upper left thigh. He felt the lead bore through his flesh, tear apart capillaries, cut open small arteries,
then slice on through the muscle and continue into the sand. He groaned.

As the terrorist’s AK-47 began to overheat, the line of fire changed and the last four rounds out of the muzzle slanted to
the right, meeting his movement, slamming into the Uzi’s receiver, blasting it apart, killing the weapon, stopping it from
ever firing again.

The Uzi spun out of his hands into the sand. Cody reached for his forty-five, but remembered he had used up the last rounds
in the room-to-room fighting, and now had only his knife. He pulled it and waited for the terrorist to stand up and try to
claim his kill.

Nothing happened.

He lay there in the sand, his thigh bleeding, his mind computing all possible reasons why the enemy had not charged forward.
Slowly, he lifted from his prone position, reversed his hold on the knife handle into a fighting one and stood so he could
see behind the rock.

Farouk Hassan was binding up his left arm. “English?” Cody asked.

“Some,” Hassan said. He picked up the knife. “I am Farouk Hassan, leader of the liberation of the aircraft two days ago. I
will not be taken prisoner.”

“Stupid thing to say,” Cody growled. “When you die, you’re dead. The only part of you that lives on is memories, and maybe
in a history book. Forget the glorious afterlife, forget your religious fantasies of Allah. If you die here, and now, it’s
like a long dreamless sleep. You simply cease to exist.”