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Even as he said it, the chopper, code-named Hind, hauled itself into the sky. The pilot rotated the helo on its axis while still partially covered by the walls of sandbags. Mounted under the nose of the Hind was a four-barreled Gatling gun, and when it cleared the top of the walls it erupted.
Linda just managed to duck through her hatch when the desert around the Pig came alive with hundreds of .50 caliber rounds. Bullets pounded into the armored windshield with enough force to star the glass, and if the onslaught continued for even a few seconds more the glass would disintegrate.
Linc dropped a gear and hit the gas, throwing a rooster tail of sand in their wake. The ground just to the left of the Pig exploded as a fresh barrage chased after them. Then came the rockets, a half dozen of them, launched off pods slung under the Hind’s stubby wings. It was like driving through a sandstorm. The unguided missiles tore into the hills all around them. Linc swerved as best he could, zigging and zagging between each impact, hoping to buy a few seconds more. One rocket hit the rear bumper, rocking the Pig on its suspension but doing little damage beyond mangling the hardened steel.
Linc looked over at Murph. “Ready?”
“Do it!”
Linc cranked the wheel and slammed the brakes with every ounce of his considerable strength. The Pig whipped around, sliding on the shifting sands, its wide stance keeping it from flipping. The instant the nose was pointed back toward the Hind, Mark unleashed a pair of Javelins, trusting their heat seekers to find the target because he couldn’t take the time to aim properly.
The Hind’s pilot lost his target in the swirling maelstrom of dust and held his fire for a moment so the wind would blow the dust away. It was from this impenetrable curtain that the two missiles emerged. The cryonic cooling system of one of them had failed to reach the proper temperature, so it couldn’t acquire the target against the still-warm desert floor. It augered into the ground and exploded well shy of the chopper.
Pointed nose-on at the incoming rockets, the Hind posed a small thermal cross section because its hull shielded the exhaust from its turbines. The pilot knew this and did nothing, hoping that playing possum could cause the missile to fly past. But the Javelin lock
ed on anyway. To its computer brain, the four glowing tubes hanging below the helicopter’s chin were enticing enough to commit to attack.
The heat seeker sent minute corrections to the missile’s fins, aiming it straight for the still-hot barrels of the Hind’s Gatling gun. The pilot tried to pull up at the last second, so the Javelin missed the gun but impacted directly under the cockpit. The explosion tore the helicopter in half, its front section nearly disintegrating, while the hull and tail boom reared up from the force of the blast. Because the main rotor was still fully engaged, the chopper lost all stability and began to spin, smoke pouring from the blackened hole that had been the cockpit. When the chopper canted over almost ninety degrees, the blades lost lift, and the ten-ton Hind crashed to earth. Its aluminum rotors tore furrows into the ground until they blasted apart, sending shrapnel careening at near-supersonic speeds. So much grit was sucked into the Isotov turbines that they flared out and seized.
The chopper’s self-sealing fuel tanks had done their job. There were no secondary explosions, and the flames around the engines’ exhausts quickly starved for gas.
Mark blew out a long breath.
“Nice shooting, Tex,” Linc drawled. He then called back to Linda, “You okay back there?”
“I know what James Bond’s martini feels like.”
“Sorry about that.”
She poked her head back into the cabin. “You guys took down the Hind, so it was an observation, not a complaint. What is this place? Some sort of border station?”
“Probably,” Linc replied.
“Take us over to the Hind, will you?” Mark asked. He was studying the downed chopper through the FLIR.
“That isn’t such a good idea. We should clear out while the clearing’s good.”
“I don’t think this is a border station,” Murph said. “I need a closer look at the helo to be sure. Also, we have to do a sweep for any communications gear left intact. If there are survivors out here, the last thing we need is them calling in reinforcements.”
Linc dropped the transmission into gear and drove the quarter mile to the wreckage. The Pig wasn’t even stopped before Mark threw open his door. Like a primitive hunter approaching a dangerous prey that he wasn’t sure was dead, Mark crept closer to the downed Hind. Linda was back up in the hatch, watching the smoldering ruins of the camp over her machine gun’s iron sights.
“What are you looking for?” she asked without looking down from her perch.
“Not for,” Mark corrected. “At.”
“Okay, then, at.”
“The air intakes aren’t normal. They’re oversized. Also, the stubs of the rotor blades.”
“And?” Linc prompted from the Pig’s cab.
Mark turned to look at him. “This chopper’s modified for high-altitude operations. I bet if I checked the fuel lines for their turbines, they’ll be larger than normal, too. And this”—he slapped a hard-point mount under the gunship’s wing—“is the launch rail for an AA-7 Apex missile.”
“So?”
“The Apex isn’t part of the typical load-out for a Hind. These are ground-attack choppers. The Apex is designed for air-to-air combat, specifically for the MiG-23 Flogger.”
“How can you be so sure?” Linda asked.
