ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (24 page)

Handon looked down at Reich. “Are we at our max speed?”

“Affirmative. A little north of it actually, with this load, twisting her guts out at one-seventy.”

“That in MPH?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the top speed of that Orca?”

Neither Reich nor Muralles knew, so Handon asked CIC.

“Wait one, Cadaver… specs show the max speed of the Ka-60 as one-nine-one.”

Handon grit his teeth.
Son of a bitch
. He switched channels. “Thunderchild, what’s the current speed of enemy air contact?”

“Cadaver, I show the Orca at one-six-six knots on the ground.”

Handon did the math – 166 knots was about 190mph. They were getting nowhere this way. Unless the Russians were afflicted by random mechanical failure, or some other act of God, they’d never catch them.

“Thunderchild, new tasking, over.”

“Send it.”

“I need you to bring down that Orca. But you can’t destroy it.”

Pause.
“Say again, Cadaver – bring the Orca DOWN?”

“Affirmative. I need that aircraft on the deck. But I need it intact. And I need you make it happen
right now
.”

Handon felt a tap at his shoulder. He turned to see Ali.

“I’ve got this one,” she said.

Handon nodded. “Thunderchild, stand by for instructions.” He handed the mic to Ali, then got out of her way.

When Ali said she had something, she generally did.

* * *

Alone in her cockpit, way up in the sky, Hailey had a couple of seconds to freak out about what was coming. She was actually still breathing hard from the trick shooting she’d had to do to drive that Black Shark away from the shore team – conducting a high-speed gun run into tight and contested airspace, with a friendly aircraft nearby, and friendly troops on the ground.

She’d somehow pulled that off.

But a world-class aerial gunner Hailey was not. She’d fumbled her way through those evolutions in her combat training, scoring just high enough to qualify. And now she lived in fear of having to do close air support when it counted – when the lives of men on the ground depended on her.

There was also the fact that she was not in anything like a fully air-to-air configured F-35. Because who the hell would have guessed she’d be engaging aerial targets on this mission? If she had been configured for air-to-air, she could have taken out the Black Shark with the delightfully named ASRAAM – Advanced Short Range Air-to-Air Missile – which, with its imaging infrared homing, would have removed Hailey’s dodgy aiming skills from the equation entirely. It almost couldn’t miss.

But she didn’t have ASRAAMs. And evidently her trick shooting was not over for the day.

“Thunderchild, Cadaver One-Two, stand by for traffic.”
It was a woman’s voice, which somehow didn’t make it any better.
“Okay – here’s exactly what you need to do…”

Hailey listened in stony silence to her slate of options. There were three of them. The first two weren’t so bad, so there was still hope she could pull this off the easy way.

She put her nose down, bled off a bunch of altitude as her airspeed came up to 800mph, then went into a wide swooping bank. And relying on radar, visual cues, and sheer brass balls, she blasted her plane straight in front of the Orca’s nose, only two hundred meters off it, creating a wave of air turbulence guaranteed to wake those guys up in the morning.

After her show-of-force flyby, she hailed them – first on the common emergency frequency, then air-to-air comms (helo), then the military common advisory channel. No response on any of them, but she transmitted her message anyway.

“Russian Federation Orca, be urgently advised – you need to bring your airspeed to zero, then descend and put it on the deck. Repeat, you need to land that aircraft, and you need to do it right now. Repeat, Orca, put it on the deck
now
.”

Nothing.

Okay
, Hailey thought.
One easy trick left in the bag.

She reduced her airspeed, brought it around again, and instead of just flying across the Orca’s path, this time she fired a long burst of her 25mm Gatling cannon. There’s no way they could miss that, not least since she had tracers loaded up. Then she got on the radio again.

“Orca – put it on the deck now, or you
will
be shot down.”

* * *

“
Nyet!
”

Like his American counterpart, the Spetsnaz ground commander, Misha, had his head stuck up in the cockpit of the helo he and his team rode in, the Ka-60 Orca.

“
Nyet, nizzle
,” he repeated to the pilot, in his rumbling basso. “It’s a fucking bluff.”

He tossed his head back to the main cabin, where their prize, the bagged-up Index Case, lay wiggling on the floor between the rows of seats, which were filled by tooled-up and steely-faced operators sitting shoulder-to-shoulder.

“They won’t shoot us down while we have that on board.”

Now Misha leaned in even farther – discomfiting the pilot,
Kapitan
Gromov, who just wanted to reach his controls and fly the damned aircraft – and peered out the cockpit glass, trying to spot the fighter that had just buzzed and strafed them. Then he grabbed Gromov’s headset, along with his head, switched to English and said aloud, “American F-35, now you be advised –
I’m in ur base, killin’ ur dudes! Ha, ha, ha, ha!
”

Misha’s laugh, which sounded like a gorilla in a rain barrel, always gave Gromov the howling fantods.

* * *

“Okay, that’s not working,” Handon said to Ali, both of them perched behind the flight deck, monitoring radio traffic.

“No,” Ali said. “They know it’s a bluff – that we’re not going to blow them out of the sky with P-Zero on board.”

For one second Handon was seized with fear and doubt. They still weren’t getting any closer to Patient Zero, and the Russian helo wasn’t stopping – in fact it was pulling their top cover, the F-35, farther away from them. If that Black Shark came back now, Handon and his people could be ashes on the ground in seconds. Should he have let Thunderchild find and destroy it first? Was he on the verge of spending all their lives for nothing?

But he was frankly sick of that longstanding anxiety of his – that he wouldn’t have the wisdom to spend the invaluable lives of his operators only when it counted. Because now, in the final act, everything counted. And their lives were forfeit. He looked into Ali’s calm and confident eyes, which always helped.

They were down to their last option.

“Without its tail rotor,” he said, “you’re sure the Orca won’t go into an uncontrolled spin?”

Ali shook her head. If a tail rotor fails in flight, engine torque can no longer be countered by it, so uncontrolled spinning was a possibility. Most manufacturers and instructors called for an immediate autorotation, some for a running landing. Ali wasn’t 100% sure about the Orca, but she did know that at its current high speed, it ought to have enough weathercock stability that limited power could be used to stretch the glide out or even maintain altitude long enough to find a spot to put it down.

But there was no time to explain all that, so she just said, “I’ve seen this pilot work. He’ll get it safely on the ground.”

That was good enough for Handon.

But then Ali hesitated and touched his sleeve. “But it’s going to come down to the shooting of the fighter pilot. We’ll definitely get the Orca on the ground – but if she screws up the shot, it’ll be in flaming pieces.”

Handon took a breath. Once again, he had to decide. And he decided they had to gamble. If they didn’t stop that Orca, Patient Zero was gone. And they were done.

He nodded his assent.

Ali hit her radio.

* * *

“Okay, Thunderchild, remember – if you hit that fenestron and get the tail rotor offline, they’ll land fast enough. But if you overdo it and blow the whole tail assembly off… they’re going to crash in a very pretty fireball. How copy?”

Hailey copied perfectly. And she understood what she had to do. She just didn’t think she could do it.

She knew that a fenestron (or fantail, sometimes called a “fan-in-fin”) was a protected tail rotor, like a ducted fan – and that was what this Orca had. The idea was that it ran quieter than an exposed tail rotor, shielded ground crew from a serious safety hazard, and also protected the rotor itself from damage.

And that did nothing to ease Hailey’s doubt that she could pull this off. Having to hit that Black Shark earlier, while it was hovering and static, had been one thing. But now she was going to have to hit a very small piece of this other helo, from the side, while it blasted through the air at nearly 200mph. This was a bit of trick shooting she had very little faith she could pull off.

She only knew she had to.

She also knew that if she screwed this up… well, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about. Or, at any rate, thinking about the consequences sure wasn’t going to help her calm down and focus on the task.

She brought her bird around to line up the shot.

* * *

A very tense interval in the Seahawk – when all they could do was sit, wait, and trust – got interrupted when Baxter motioned for Handon from in back. “It’s Jake, down in the ground convoy,” he said, raising his voice over the general racket.

“Not a great time,” Handon said.

Baxter hesitated. “Um, listen. I had tell him about Kate. And now he wants to talk to you.”

Handon exhaled. As the local commander, Jake was due some deference. And more so since Handon had just lost – or, even worse, chosen to sacrifice – one of his team members. He changed channels.

“Cadaver Three, this is Cadaver One Actual, go ahead.”

“What the hell happened?”
Jake didn’t preface this, and he didn’t need to elaborate. Baxter had already told him Kate hadn’t made it.

“The Seahawk took an RPG hit, and she fell out.”

“How? Wasn’t she clipped into a safety harness?”

Handon took a breath. “The op went a little sideways.”

“I bet. Is she DEAD?”
When Handon didn’t immediately reply, Jake went on.
“Did you see her body, check for a pulse – and do thirty minutes of chest compressions? No? Then she’s not fucking dead.”

Handon worked to modulate his response. He knew Jake wasn’t wrong. And he was obviously distraught about one of his people being MIA. “Maybe she is still alive. Maybe she even would have been alive in thirty seconds if we’d stayed and jumped down to try and rescue her.”

“But instead you left her behind, you son of a bitch.”

Handon took another breath. Some part of him knew the anger in Jake’s voice wasn’t really directed at him. The SF team sergeant was angry at himself, for not having been there. Then again, the fact that he hadn’t been there was also Handon’s fault – he had ordered him off the helo.

So he kept his own voice neutral and told Jake something he already knew. “I’m sorry about your soldier. But she’s one woman. And everyone left alive is counting on us now – and we’d just lost the one thing that can save them. I had to go after that. You would have, too.”

But as he paused, he wondered if Jake really could have left her behind if he’d been there – just flown away, with Kate hanging onto that platform over the undead horde. Could Handon himself have done it, if it had been Sarah instead? Would he have been strong enough? But then he saw Ali gesturing for him, listening on the other channel.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “Cadaver One out.”

Hard and Fast

Hailey’s F-35, 150 Feet Above Central Somalia

Hailey was now down at low altitude with her prey, the radar-dodging Orca. This meant she wasn’t showing up on radar either. But her job was flying a stealth fighter, so she was never really supposed to show up on radar in the first place.

Then again, everyone had figured there was no one out there operating hostile radar anymore. So the constant attention and profiling that real stealth required – carrying weapons and fuel tanks in internal bays rather than external hardpoints, reducing outgoing RF emissions, touching up radar-absorbent paint, etc. – had been allowed to slide.

As Hailey completed another wide loop around the Orca, she snapped her attention back to her task. One of her shortcomings as a pilot was a tendency for her mind to wander. In this case, she figured it was that she simply didn’t want to think about what she had to do now.

Because she was pretty sure this tasking – disabling an enclosed tail rotor, without destroying it, all at extremely high speed – was simply beyond her abilities. If it were a regular tail rotor, and not a fenestron, she could just fall in behind, match airspeed, and then plink at the damned thing until she chipped all the rotor blades off.

But as it was, the tail housing completely enclosed the rotor. So she had no reason to think either that plinking from behind would take the rotor out – or that she wouldn’t destroy its structural integrity and take out the whole housing. Or the whole damned tail for that matter. This Orca had nothing like the armor or structural toughness of the Black Shark she’d hit earlier.

Her GAU-22/A “Equalizer” Gatling cannon had awesome accuracy. But it was also loaded with 25mm high-explosive incendiary/armor-piercing (HEIAP) rounds. Emphasis on high-explosive. And incendiary. And armor-piercing. The whole point of the things was to destroy enemy aircraft – or vehicles, or artillery, or bunkers.

In any case, because of its enclosure, for her take out the rotor while leaving the tail was going to require her to hit it side-on – with the helo moving forward at 200mph, and her moving as much as ninety degrees to the helo’s path, also at no less than 200mph (her stall speed). Just trying to imagine the calculations – which involved the muzzle velocity of her autocannon, not to mention calculus – made her skin itch.

But somehow she still didn’t have it in her to radio back and tell them she couldn’t do it. She had to try.