Light Up the Night

Chapter 1-3

It was the embedded agent. He was staying behind. There was no way his charade would hold up after a successful rescue of the hostages occurred right under his nose.

A glance around the neighborhood from her vantage point a hundred feet up in the air told her he was about to be too stupid for words and way too dumb to survive.

A pair of inbound technicals, pickup trucks with big machine guns mounted in their beds, were racing toward the pirate compound at high speed.

Cursing loudly, knowing she should be already headed to the beach, she put her nose down and dove into the small courtyard.

“What the hell are you doing?” Bill shouted at the pilot who had grounded his craft with the rotor inches from him. He’d ducked to keep his head from being chopped off, though the pilot had been pretty damned precise with his positioning. They were only fifteen feet apart.

“Get aboard!” the pilot was shouting at him. “I’m saving your ass.” Boston. He could hear it in the pilot’s voice even over the beat of the rotors.

Bill shook his head and waved them off. The pilot and his copilot wore the full flight suits of Special Operations Forces aviators, FN-SCAR rifles strapped across their chests, and large black helmets with black visors covering their faces. The pilot had a big green shamrock painted on the side of his helmet.

Irish. Boston Irish. It figured. Only an Irishman would be dumb enough to come in and blow his cover.

“Get out of here! You’re screwing me over!”

“There are two technicals coming in from the south and west,” the pilot shouted as he kept the blades at near takeoff, the helo actually bouncing its skids on the soil.

Okay, he had to admit that didn’t sound good. The technicals were the scourge of the Somali streets. A Jeep or a Toyota pickup with a heavy machine gun mounted in the truck’s bed. It would often have five or six other guys with automatic weapons along for the ride.

Then the pilot jerked his hands from the controls, grabbed the rifle hanging across his chest in one smooth upward sweep, and fired it over Bill’s shoulder. The light of the muzzle flash was blinding, but thankfully he was far enough back to avoid any powder burns. It had been a damn smooth move, worthy of a SEAL.

He turned to see who the pilot had shot. The muzzle flash of the second shot lit the dingy square.

Abshir. Now with two holes in his shirt as he fell backward. Good patterning as well; both were probably heart shots. His AK-47 was still aimed at Bill and the helo, but there was no one alive to pull the trigger.

Okay, maybe the pilot was right and it was getting too hot to stay here. That was one of the problems of running undercover. It became easy to believe that you belonged. That psych condition was trained for, but it was damned difficult to avoid.

He ducked his head and sprinted to the side of the helo. It was the attack version of the MH-6, so there were no side benches and the tiny inside passenger compartment behind the pilots’ seats was packed with the large ammo cases for the Miniguns.

He found a spot to hang on to outside, barely, behind the side wings where the weaponry was hung on hardpoints. He slapped the side of the helicopter hard.

The pilot didn’t waste time looking back.

They were aloft before Bill had time to place his second foot cleanly on the skid.

Three technicals were roaring into the area, one appearing far back of the other two.

He hoped the pilot remembered he was here and didn’t fire any rockets off his side. He’d get serious burns from the rocket motors if he did.

Trisha cursed the man for eight kinds of an i***t. Now she was out of balance with his additional weight on the right side and barely off the ground as three technicals roared into the square.

She’d fired a thousand-odd rounds and a pair of rockets that would make up for a third of his weight. And she’d burned about ten gallons of fuel since the start of the mission at six-plus pounds a piece, which bought her another third. Still, he made her overweight and it was a major struggle to compensate. Time to dump more ammo, which was fine with her.

“Open fire, guns only!” she called to Roland and stamped on the left foot-pedal, which would press Mr. Jerk against the helo rather than flinging him off. He’d better hang on anyway.

Two feet off the ground, the helo spun beneath the rotor like a child’s wooden spinning top. Roland unleashed both M134s as they rotated about their central axis. A line of fire three feet above the ground arced outward like a buzz saw. It sliced through everything in its sweeping path.

It chewed up the front walls of houses, hammering a line of holes through each burlap door. She hoped that if there was anyone home, they were lying down on the ground, as any sensible person would be during a firefight. Anyone standing up was already shot.

It also dragged a line of fire across the front of each technical. It shredded radiators, engines, front windshields.

Roland was reading off rotor blade and tail clearances from the buildings—she couldn’t take time to look herself. But it was exactly what she needed to maintain flight safety.

By the second rotation of the Little Bird, people were bailing off the truck beds.

On the third rotation, the two lead technicals exploded in balls of fire, and she decided it was high time to be somewhere else, preferably before her engine scooped up chunks of truck shrapnel.

“Off!” she called to Roland, and she leveraged her spinning energy into a rolling climb and a lot of forward speed.

She leaned out and looked back. Their passenger was still there.

The third technical went up in a ball of fire behind them as she cleared the beach. Not a whole lot of ground fire was following them. She dropped back to wave height, resisting adding a victory roll because of their passenger.

3:05:30. Two and a half minutes in country.

“Feet wet.” She called on the radio to let the AMC know she was safely clear of the land and back over the water.