Meat, Camel and Jam stepped up in a V formation, pointing M-16s at the marines.
‘Let’s keep things friendly, fellas,’ Meat suggested. ‘Let the man inside. You know he’s right. So be smart, will you please? Right now we’ve all got a real battle to fight.’ He tipped his head towards the road where the remaining marines were mobilized, struggling to hold back the advancing enemy convoy now a half klick south.
The marines exchanged glances.
‘You’ve got big balls, pal,’ the taller one said.
‘And I’ve got the dick to match them,’ Meat boasted. ‘So what’s it gonna be?’
The taller man grimaced, lowered his weapon, then tapped his partner on the arm and motioned for him to step aside. ‘Behave yourself in there,’ the marine warned Jason.
Jason nodded to Meat, then swiftly made his way through the door.
*
Inside the tent, Jason was shocked to see that Al-Zahrani was gone and that the medic had been shot dead. Momentarily sidetracked by the miasma that covered the bed, he registered a tiny blinking red light. It was the tripod-mounted camcorder Crawford had set up to record his interrogation. Jason darted over to it and checked the device’s tiny LCD screen, which flashed ‘DISK FULL.’ How long had the device been offline? With no time to review the footage, he hit the eject button, took out the mini-DVD disk and pocketed it.
Then his eyes caught the splotchy blood trail that began alongside the bed and snaked to the rear door.
He sprinted to the rear door and threw it open. Out back there were no guards and Crawford was nowhere to be found. In the sand, parallel tyre tracks curled around the side of the tent. Dust from a moving vehicle still hung in the air.
Jason dashed around the tent, his eyes tracing where the tyre tracks bent on to the roadway, heading north. Despite the danger from flying bullets, he ran out near the road and ducked behind the confiscated pickup trucks - now three instead of four. Looking north, he found the fourth pickup racing along the winding roadway. The driver was wearing a turban. The passenger’s slumped head - also wrapped in a turban - was barely visible through the blown-out rear cabin window. He had no doubt it was Al-Zahrani.
There was no way a militant could have broken the perimeter, snuck Al-Zahrani out from the tent, and stolen the truck unnoticed. And why hadn’t Crawford had guards posted at the tent’s rear door? Because an insider orchestrated the grab, Jason quickly concluded. ‘Crawford, you motherfucker.’
Where could they be taking Al-Zahrani? Something told him that Crawford wasn’t concerned about protecting the prisoner. So what was his motive?
‘Yaeger, get out of there!’ a distant voice screamed. ‘Grenade!’
Without thought, Jason sprang up and ran for the shallow ravine that cut along the opposite side of the road. On the periphery of his vision, he glimpsed the mortar arcing through the air on a direct line for the trucks, just before he dived for cover.
He was midair when the mortar struck. Amidst a spray of heat and glass, a tyre rim hurtled directly for his head like a frisbee. He was certain he would be decapitated. But the blast wave cartwheeled his body forward and down an instant before that could happen.
He landed on his back at the bottom of the muddy ditch. He slowly opened his eyes and assessed his body, fully expecting to see some missing parts. Amazingly, no shrapnel had touched him - not even a graze. Everything moved fine, nothing felt broken. Just some ringing in his ears.
‘Google!’ a concerned voice yelled.
Jason looked up and saw it was Meat.
‘Dude! I thought you were dead!’ He slung his M-16 over his shoulder and slid down into the ditch. ‘I saw you running out here. What are you, nuts?’
‘They took Al-Zahrani. Moved him out in one of the pickup trucks … heading north.’ Jason pointed.
‘Who?’
‘Pretty sure it was Crawford or one of his men.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘Don’t know. But we’ve got to get Al-Zahrani back.’ He raised a hand up, saying, ‘Give me a pull, will ya.’
Meat clasped Jason’s hand and tugged him to his feet.
‘The trucks are toast,’ Meat said. ‘And there’s only one Humvee left … but it’s got two flat tyres.’
‘So we’ll follow them in the MRAP,’ Jason replied hastily.
‘Way too slow. That thing’s not built for speed and it’s a pig on gas. They might have a good head start, but I’ve got a better idea,’ Meat said. ‘Let’s go.’
Nestled behind a hill on the camp’s northern limit, the Blackhawk had yet to sustain bombardment. That indicated to Jason that the militants had concentrated on a purely southern incursion, with no artillery fire coming from the expansive western plain, or the mountains to the north and east. Most likely, the enemy scout Jason had spotted earlier had been spooked by the patrolling marines and realized that any attempt to surround the encampment would take too long and prove too risky.
Jason knew that once the hostile RPG gunners were in range, the Blackhawk would become their primary target.
‘Let’s go! Move it!’ Meat yelled towards the camp from the top of the hill. He waved impatiently for Camel and Jam to pick up their pace. Then he ran down the hill towards Jason.
‘You still know how to fly one of these things?’ Jason asked.
Meat gave the chopper a sideways glance. ‘No worries, bro,’ he said, patting Jason on the shoulder.
Meat hurried to the chopper, opened the cockpit door, and hopped in the pilot’s seat.
Camel and Jam crested the hill and scrambled down to Jason.
Seeing them alive gave Jason relief. At the onset of the attack, they’d all been safe inside the cave helping to clear debris.
‘It’s pandemonium back there!’ Jam said.
‘Where’s Hazo?’ Jason asked.
‘He’s fine,’ Camel said. ‘He said he’ll stay here and keep an eye on things.’
With Crawford unaccounted for, Jason wasn’t thrilled about the idea. But there was no time to deliberate. ‘Fine.’
The Blackhawk’s engines fired up. Seconds later, the turbine whined to life and the flopping rotors began turning, gathering momentum.
‘You’ve got to be shitting me,’ Camel said, with frightened eyes on the cockpit window where Meat was putting on his flying helmet. ‘You’re letting
him
fly?’
‘We’ve got no choice,’ Jason said. ‘Meat said the pilots were inside the first Humvee that blew.’
‘Mother Mary,’ Jam said.
‘He figured out how to turn the thing on,’ Camel offered with a sigh. ‘It’s a start.’
Jason trotted to the chopper and slid open the fuselage door. He leaped inside, Camel and Jam coming in behind him.
While Jason settled in the copilot’s seat alongside Meat, Camel and Jam each claimed a jumpseat and began buckling their harnesses. Jason looked over to Meat. The guy’s eyes were nervously roving the controls, hands splayed flat on his thighs.
‘You sure you can do this?’ Jason asked him.
‘Just like riding a bike, right?’ Meat chuckled nervously.
Jason wasn’t so sure. It had been eight years since Meat’s brief stint with the Coast Guard. Shortly after 9/11, sea patrol and rescue missions had become increasingly dangerous as Islamic extremists used sea routes to circumvent US border patrols. Homeland Security responded by cross-training military personnel to accompany Coast Guard crews. Most of Meat’s training had been inside a simulator, and he had only logged a few flight hours inside a Sikorsky Jayhawk. The Blackhawk’s instrumentation and gadgetry, though, was more complicated and he could see that Meat was mentally running through the mechanical sequences, reacquainting himself with the gauges and controls. And unlike the Jayhawk, its bigger cousin was fully outfitted with armaments and countermeasures.
Suddenly, something flashed along the hill’s crest, burst bright orange and rang like a thunderclap. The chopper rocked sideways as blast debris clanged against the fuselage. Stones strafed Meat’s window and fractured the glass into a web of cracks.
‘Go!’ Jason yelled into the helmet microphone.
Meat excitedly pushed down too hard on the collective control stick, forcing the Blackhawk to jolt upward. As if he weredriving a car, his right foot instinctively stomped the anti-torque pedal so that the nose yawed perilously to the right, swinging the mountainside into full view.
Jason grabbed hold of the grip bars, bracing for collision.
Then Meat got the feel for the pedals and used his left foot to rotate the chopper and orient the nose back towards the plain.
Camel yelled through the intercom, ‘Grenade!’
Meat saw it streaming towards them. He pushed the cyclic control stick forward and left, to pitch the vector. The nose dipped and the chopper shot forward. The RPG mortar practically skimmed the Blackhawk’s belly before striking the cliff face, throwing off a concussion wave that whumped the chopper like an invisible fist.
Meat fought with the controls to keep the chopper straight.
‘Get us clear!’ Jason yelled, pointing out over the plain. ‘Then move into firing range!’
‘Roger,’ Meat said.
‘Firing range?’ Camel muttered over the intercom.
‘We can’t abandon the platoon,’ Jason said. ‘They won’t be able to hold off those gunners. We’ve got enough firepower to take them down.’
‘What about the truck? Al-Zahrani?’ Jam said.
‘We’ll catch up to them,’ Jason replied confidently. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘You’ll need to work the weapons console,’ Meat said, glancing over at Jason. He pointed to the copilot controls in front of him.
Staring down at the switches, gauges and computer interfaces, Jason felt instantly overwhelmed.
Meat flipped some switches on the cyclic’s grip which powered on the AGM-114 Hellfire missiles rack-mounted on the pylons. The targeting interface illuminated on the LCD in front of Jason - a camera tracing the terrain beneath the chopper with glowing night vision, overlaid with crosshairs.
‘Works like a videogame,’ Meat explained to Jason. ‘I’ll walk you through it as soon as we’re in range.’
‘Got it.’
Safely out over the plain, Meat banked the chopper along a wide arc and headed south to allow for the first glimpse of the enemy convoy.
‘Holy shit!’ Jam said. ‘Look at them all!’ He pointed out the fuselage window.
Jason saw what he meant. There looked to be almost a dozen trucks on the road south from the camp.
‘All right,’ Meat said, flipping down the helmet’s night-vision lenses. He paused to study the enemy formation. ‘They’re bunched up pretty nicely along the road. I’ll take us two klicks out so we can line up for a nice shot. I’ll need to focus on keeping this thing steady. So I’ll need you to send some rockets at ‘em,’ he told Jason. ‘Use the toggle button on top of the grip to move the crosshairs over the target. Then squeeze the trigger to get a laser on it … you’ll see it come up on the screen. Just be sure to keep the laser dot on the target until the rocket hits. Use the red button to fire the missile. Fire and forget. Think you can do it?’
‘Roger that,’ Jason said, focused on the targeting screen and getting a feel for the control grip. He used his thumb to move the crosshairs side to side. As he tested the forward and backward functions, the camera zoomed in and out.
‘They see us coming,’ Jam said, scanning the militants through his night-vision goggles. The Arabs were scrambling to target the incoming Blackhawk.
‘Doesn’t matter. Their RPGs are only good up to a thousand metres. And their guns can only shoot half that distance. They won’t know what hit ‘em,’ Meat said.
Climbing higher, Meat smoothly circled along a northerly course. ‘Get ready,’ he said to Jason.
He swung the chopper around, gained more altitude, and let the digital stabilization system assist in hovering the chopper. Luckily, there was minimal drag from the light winds moving over the plain. ‘Go for it, Jay. Give ‘em hell.’
The roadway cut horizontally along the targeting display, sandwiched by the foothills on the back side, a deep ravine and dense wheat field in the front. The convoy lined up onscreen like a shooting gallery. Jason immediately knew that the Arabs’ hasty attack was about to backfire horribly on them. He decided to use the same tactic that roadside bombers had so frequently employed when assaulting US convoys - strike the lead vehicle first, then the rearmost vehicle next to immobilize everything in between.
Jason felt his stomach go into a knot as he zoomed in and panned the crosshairs over one of the trucks fanned out in the front of the convoy.
‘Remember to keep the laser on the target until the missile hits,’ Meat said.
‘Got it,’ Jason said. He squeezed the trigger control and a flashing red dot appeared on the display. He adjusted the aim, held the dot steady, and the crosshairs flashed from red to green. He slid his thumb over the red firing button and pressed down on it.
The first missile hissed out from its pod, shot out in front of the chopper along a high arc, then bobbed and weaved as its onboard guidance system synchronized with the laser’s coordinates. Jason kept his eyes nailed to the crosshairs, made slight adjustments for the side-to-side rocking caused by Meat’s less than graceful attempt to hover the Blackhawk. Onscreen the missile struck with a brilliant flash.