The Night Is Mine

Chapter 24

24

“Viper, this is Oversight.”

Mark wrenched the cyclic hard left, and Richardson fired three FFAR rockets as their nose crossed over the SAM missile battery. Everything was going wrong tonight. The Little Bird that had inserted the Ranger four-man squad to check out an abandoned Russian tank had been shot down. Clay was down there in his Black Hawk trying to extract the two injured pilots and recover the Rangers before they were overrun.

The 10th Mountain had promised the area was quiet and then they’d walked into a machine-gun emplacement that tore through their first two squads.

The second rocket hit the SAM battery, which lit the sky as it blew up.

“Viper, aye.” He checked the clock. The Apache Longbow backup gunships of the 101st Airborne were still three minutes away. Completely useless.

He reefed back to the right and watched as a stream of tracers sliced through the air he’d occupied less than two seconds before.

“Enough of this s**t!” He stood the Black Hawk on its nose, setting the rotors to drag the Hawk straight forward. Hopefully too fast for the ground troops to compensate. “Coming up in five, four…” He saw Richardson arming everything. One the count of zero, they lit into the baddies.

Eight rocket trails streaked from the helicopter straight down. Mark linked the 30 mm cannon into his vision-tracking. He spotted the howitzer emplacement in the flare of the rockets piling into the trucks and buildings. Lining up the crosshairs in his heads-up display, he unleashed the 30. Ten rounds a second of ammunition, each over an inch across, ripped into men and machines. Then his crew chiefs pounded a couple hundred rounds from both the Miniguns in the second and a half the emplacement was in range.

The capper was the Hellfire missile that Richardson dead-centered on the howitzer. In an air-shattering explosion, the whole place was gone.

“Viper, we thought you’d want to know.”

“What?” The overhead AWACS battle commanders were rarely coy. Of course, the eye-in-the-sky wasn’t part of his battle. As far as he knew, the closest one was working thirty miles to the east and had no idea of the mess he had on his hands.

He circled hard and spotted thirty fighters on foot cresting the ridge above the downed MH-6 and Clay’s transport Hawk. And he didn’t need a close look. He didn’t need to see if they had IR tags sewn into their uniforms to identify them as friendlies with his NVGs. He could tell by their movements as green silhouettes across his night-vision goggles that they were not regular Army.

“Clay, you’ve got under fifteen seconds to be airborne.”

“Need forty-five,” Clay called back.

“Steel, boys!” he called over the intercom. “Hard steel!” He knew there was a .50-cal machine gun he hadn’t found yet, but he couldn’t let the rescue site be overrun, though that .50 could punch nasty holes in his own bird. The crew chiefs began burping out hundred-round splashes from their Miniguns at anything that moved.

“There’s been an incident stateside,” Oversight’s dispatcher sounded calm, as if he was busy scratching himself.

Mark didn’t give a damn about stateside at this particular moment. He kept the nose aimed at the ridge above Clay’s helo and began moving sideways so that all of the Hawk’s weapons had a clear sweep of the rocky ridgeline.

“We picked this up off the news. Emily Beale’s been shot down. She’s alive and in the hospital, but apparently, well…”

Mark swallowed hard.

“They say she may be blind. Sorry, Mark. Thought you’d want to know.”

Mark opened the 30 mm cannon against the ridgeline. He let the whole belt of ammo run through the gun at 625 rounds per minute. The feed lasted ninety full seconds, tearing up the ridgeline and anyone trying to cross, sounding like a single sustained scream inside the helo.

When the feed ran out, his throat felt as if he’d been the one screaming.