Echo Six: Black Ops 7 - Tibetan Fury (24 page)

"Shoot them down."

"Understood. Starting the attack now."

* * *

"She's coming in from behind!" Guy shouted.

He'd been studying the tiny radar screen in the center of the console. Although the snowstorm tried to obliterate everything, the fighter was so close it showed as a murky dot on the screen, a dot almost merging with their position in the center of the display.

Talley held on as the aircraft suddenly banked and swerved to port, and a stream of cannon shells split the air a few meters off their starboard wing. Then the aircraft hurtled past them, causing them to rock in the slipstream. One shell punched a hole in the wing, and Guy automatically corrected for the altered aerodynamics. Fortunately, the big transport was built like a flying truck and could take that kind of punishment, but not much more.

"He'll be ready for that maneuver next time he comes in," Talley warned, "We're going to have to think of something different."

"Right now, the only thing that would save us is a rear gunner. We have to land, and you know we're flying over the Himalayas. Landing fields are few and far between in this region."

"Hold on, I may have an idea."

He ran back into the cargo hold. The Buddhists seemed to be locked in silent contemplation, and he left them to whatever they were doing. The rest of the men were trying to look out through the tiny windows set in the fuselage, to search for the fighter.

"Listen up, people. That aircraft will be back in a few minutes, and he'll be trying to pump more than a few cannon shells into our rear. I think we can hurt him. When he comes in again, we drop the ramp. It may just work."

He spoke to them for a few moments, and they went to the rear to position themselves next to the ramp. Buchmann was in the center, almost on the edge of the ramp, clutching his grenade launcher.

"Heinrich, secure yourself to the cargo webbing. When the ramp opens, you're likely to be sucked out by the turbulence."

"I'll be fine," he growled.

Talley nodded at Rovere. "Strap him in."

The Italian nodded and found loose strips of webbing to fasten the big German to the ramp straps. He heard Guy call from the front.

"He's circled around and lining up to come in again about three kilometers behind us. I'd estimate thirty seconds until he's in position to open fire."

"Roger that." He glanced at the men waiting, weapons held grimly, knowing this was their last and only throw of the dice. When you were blasted by cannon fire thousands of feet up in the thin skies over the Himalayas, there'd be no survivors. None.

"Get in position."

Admiral Brooks and Virgil Kane lay prone on the floor, their Minimis ready to shoot. They were surrounded by the rest of the men crouched around the floor, holding their assault rifles ready. In the center, lashed to the ramp itself with heavy webbing, the grim figure of Heinrich Buchmann. The only trooper standing was Kaz, who waited next to the controls for the ramp.

It was too little, pitifully little, when pitched against a heavily armed supersonic fighter, but it was all they had. Almost all. He glanced around at the civilians. The nuns had made a protective circle around Tempa Rinpoche. Lobsang Cho and David Campbell had joined the circle nearest to the cockpit. Behind them stood Grace Ferraro. He called to her.

"Get your people to lie flat on the floor. We're about to be hit with cannon fire."

She smiled. "They know that." But still none of them moved.

Damn, but it’s up to them
.

He keyed his mic. "Guy, we're ready."

"Roger that. He's coming in, closer, closer. A few seconds more, five, four, three, two…"

He didn't make it to one. The cannon fire tore through the aircraft cabin, ripping massive holes in the aluminum and exiting all the way through the cockpit. He could only hope Guy hadn't been hit, but there was no time to worry about it. He dived to the floor, his MP7 loaded with a full clip, and waited as the motor whined and the ramp began to lower. The sight that greeted them was extraordinary.

Even at high altitude, the snow was falling in thick, heavy flakes. The pursuing aircraft was so close they could see the pilot's oxygen mask and goggles. Maybe it was an illusion, but Talley swore he could see the pilot's eyes widen at the astonishing sight. A lumbering transport aircraft, a sitting duck waiting for his next cannon burst. They should give up and die. They must die! And then the ramp opened, and inside a bunch of armed men clustered around it. Madness! He'd know that only lunatics would take on a supersonic fighter interceptor armed only with assault rifles.

"Fire! Give it to him!"

He pulled the trigger, and in the space of a few seconds, the firing pin clicked on empty. Brooks and Kane were hammering at the fighter with their Minimis, although it was impossible to see if they scored any hits. The rest of the men fired at the same time, and sheets of lead lashed out at their pursuer. Only Buchmann hadn't moved. He waited. Then he spoke to Guy.

"Slow, slow. Ja, ist good. Drop the flaps," His guttural Germanic English was even thicker.

Guy understood and reacted immediately. The flaps lowered, and the Y-7 seemed to stop dead in the air. The fighter was caught off guard and unable to react in time. The nose was nearing the open ramp and slightly below it, when Buchmann finally fired. The first grenade left the launcher, then the second, and the third.

Talley saw them explode all around the enemy aircraft, yet the pilot moved to compensate for the shock waves that threatened to put his aircraft into a stall. He almost recovered when the fourth grenade detonated over his canopy.

The explosion was so close it smashed the armored Perspex, and the pilot started to look up until shards of hot metal hammered into him. He passed out, or more probably died, and his hands and feet left the controls. The nose dropped, the start of a stall. A live pilot could have recovered, but this pilot was dead.

"We did it!" Virgil shouted.

The fuselage echoed to the shouts and laughter of cheering men. Kaz raised the ramp, and Talley grinned at them.

"That was well done, men."

Rovere smiled happily. "He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a tip-toe when this day is named."

"We're not safe home yet," Talley warned, "I'll get back to the cockpit and check in with Guy. You'd better make sure the civilians are all okay and none of them were hit."

Even Brooks was smiling. "I guess that may have been a novel experience for them, involved in a mid-air gun battle."

It was for us, too.

As he went past the monks and nuns, they didn't seem to have moved. If any of them had been hit, it sure wasn't obvious. Maybe they just lived right. Grace followed him into the cockpit, and he told Guy how it had happened. The Brit shook his head in disbelief.

"You managed to beat a fighter jet, in midair, with light weapons? Unbelievable."

"Yeah, I guess the pilot had the same thought just before he died. How is this bucket of bolts hanging together? Any damage from the cannon fire?"

Guy pointed to the co-pilot's console, right in front of where Talley would have been sitting if he'd stayed in the cockpit. A cannon shell had punched a massive hole all the way through and out through the nose. Guy had plugged the hole with an old duffel bag he'd found somewhere on the floor, but the wind was howling through the gaps.

"You were lucky, Boss. I reckon that one had your name on it."

He opened his mouth to reply and closed it. An awful noise of tearing, rending metal resounded through the cockpit, and the plane shook like a wet dog. Automatically, he looked out the starboard window. The wing root, the exact place named in the defect report, had begun to separate from the fuselage. The entire starboard wing was about to part company with the rest of the aircraft. He turned to Guy.

"She's about to fall apart. Land, now! Anywhere."

"There's nowhere to land, not on top of a fucking mountain," he shouted.

"I don't care. Either land now, or we all die."

Guy shrugged. "Here goes."

He put the nose down, throttled back, and the aircraft began a sharp descent. The noise from the starboard wing became worse, a grinding and tearing that meant they had only seconds before they lost the wing completely. Guy was fighting with the controls, a losing battle to keep the aircraft level. They were going down fast, and the uneven forces threatened to roll the aircraft over. As Talley struggled with the control column, fighting to help Guy compensate for the ruined wing, he keyed his mic.

"All of you; brace for a hard landing! This is going to be bad, real bad. Make sure the civilians know what to do."

"They're praying," Rovere answered after a few seconds, "I tried to make them see sense, but they just don't get it."

"Roger that."

He suddenly remembered Grace and looked around. She was still standing behind him, holding onto the back of his seat against the steep angle of the cockpit floor. Her expression told him she was a long way away, her mind in some elevated place, far away from this maelstrom of dark, cold terror.

"Get yourself strapped in!" he screamed at her.

She suddenly seemed to snap out of it. She quickly seated herself in the navigator's chair and fastened the straps.

"There's nowhere to put her down!" Guy shouted to him, "We need a level surface, but it's all rocky slopes!"

"Keep looking."

He stared through the windshield, but even when there were gaps in the snowfall, enough to see the ground, it was sharp outcrops of rock, plenty of places to wreck a plane, but not to land one. Abruptly, the cockpit door opened, and Campbell stepped through. He'd changed. His battered face still bore the scars of his brutal treatment, but he'd regained that infuriating inner calm they all seemed to possess. He struggled to reach the front, pulling himself hand over hand to stop himself being flung to the front of the aircraft. He shouted over the roar of the engines and the howling of the slipstream.

"You must put her down now. There is a flat stretch of ground directly ahead of us."

The Brit stared at him. "How can you possibly know that?"

"I don't. Tampa Rinpoche told us it is so."

Guy grimaced. "I'll rely on my eyesight rather than any of your fancy hocus-pocus, but thanks for the thought."

Talley saw Grace staring at him. She gave him a slight nod, and somehow, deep down in his guts, he knew it was their best chance.

Or am I hallucinating like
the religious nuts back in the cargo hold.
What difference does it make? We stay up here, we die; we go down, we die.

"Take her down, Guy. It'll be there, like he says."

Guy stared at him. "What makes you so sure?" Then he saw Grace, and he understood, "You're not serious, Boss. Not you too? Fuck, it's like an epidemic."

"Do it. We're going to make it." He grinned, "Besides, do we have a choice?"

Welland thought for a second and then nodded. "You're right. We don't have a choice. Going down now. Lend me a hand. This is going to be tricky, and then some."

They both fought with the controls as the aircraft slowly fell apart around them. All the time, they were faced with a stark choice; a choice between the wing root tearing apart in the air, and landing on a jagged, snow-covered mountaintop.

As choices go, it could only be worse if the plane exploded.

They could see the mountaintop more frequently as they dropped lower. They flew over jagged outcrops of rock that seemed to reach out, wanting to spear the belly of their aircraft on their sharp points and tear out its guts. And then Talley saw it.

"There! Two kilometers to port, just before that uneven rock face."

Guy stared down through the windshield. "There? Jesus Christ, you couldn't land a glider on there. It'll have to be..."

"Land there! If we don't get down in the next few seconds, we'll be splattered all over the mountainside. It's our only hope."

He sighed. "You got it."

He chopped the throttles back further until the propellers were just turning over, and managed to sideslip toward the pocket handkerchief-sized flat space. Lower, lower, they dropped closer to the ground, and then a powerful gust ripped the fuselage to one side, and both men had to work hard to correct. Somewhere the hydraulics had sprung a leak, and the controls were even heavier and sluggish, but they used all of their strength to force the aircraft back on course, almost as if by willpower alone.

There was no need to think about the undercarriage, even if it worked, which was unlikely. Their only hope was to slam the belly of the aircraft down onto that piece of flat ground and pray it didn't disintegrate. If they were really lucky, the snow would be thick and soft enough to cushion their landing.

Another gust caught them, and by some freak of nature pushed them toward the landing site, shoving them downward, as if some giant hand pressed down on the fuselage. They were only ten meters above the ground and almost on the landing site.

Talley reached forward, chopped the throttles, and lowered the flaps all the way. The aircraft dropped like a stone. At the last second, he pulled back to flare in for a landing. It was the only way to touchdown, except that a meter above the ground the starboard wing sheared off completely, and the nose began to spin to the right.