Читать книгу State Of Honour - Gary Haynes - Страница 29

The sound of the twin engines and huge tandem rotor blades scything the cold air was near-deafening as the special ops Chinook flew at almost two-hundred miles per hour. The Black Hawks had silenced rotors and engines, but by the time the Chinooks got there it would be game on. Dusk had fallen now and the clouds were high and wispy, the skyline above the mountains the colour of hacked strawberries.

Tom had been told to wear a seat belt and helmet to stop himself from knocking himself out if the helicopter had to take a sharp turn or got caught in downdraft. Although the cabin had been fitted out with padding, it still looked as if it was weeks away from being finished. But anything that wasn’t functional was left out, especially on a mission. The operators called the helicopter the flying school bus, which Tom thought inappropriate.

He sat on a red canvas, aluminium-framed seat, his feet placed firmly on the metal decking with exposed rivets. Crane, wearing a clear earpiece attached to a PTT radio, sat beside him, talking to one of the other CIA men who were in flight. An iron-pumper with a black beard and square face, a real Cro-Magnon hard case, who was nodding as Crane talked in short loud bursts like a drunk in a noisy bar.

From the oval porthole opposite him, Tom could see a four-blade Apache attack helicopter. It was a state-of-the-art killing machine, the nose-mounted sensor hub housing the night-vision systems for its 30-mm Chain Gun carried between the landing gear, and the Hellfire missiles and Hydra rocket pods on the stub-wings sticking out of the fuselage behind the cockpit. But he knew such weapons had been of little use in a guerrilla war where the combatants had dressed like locals and had lived among them, too.

The Apaches would fly ahead soon and be the second wave of attack, once the Black Hawks had landed at the insertion point and there was no further need for an element of surprise, however brief. Then they would buzz the valleys of the White Mountains in the vicinity, deterring any element of reinforcements. The drone reconnaissance hadn’t shown up any other settlements nearby, but a group of Leopards could always be squatting under scrub or in dugouts.

Tom chewed his lip and grabbed the seat bar as the Chinook hit turbulence. He knew he was heading for a death zone.

The last time he’d flown in a helicopter had been on a short flight from DC to Richmond, Virginia, where the secretary had opened a library at South University. That was a fortnight ago. He’d thought that his time with her would end in a clean slate until he’d gotten the call from his direct superior, informing him that she would be going to Islamabad. He never knew why, in detail. He didn’t have to know. He was only ever told her destination days before if her schedule changed. But he’d felt uneasy from the beginning, a nagging doubt that had played out as fretful dreams.

Crane turned to Tom. “ETA five minutes,” he mouthed, holding up five fingers. He opened up a laptop to get the live feeds. “That’s the view from Sawyer’s video camera in Salt One,” he bellowed. “That’s the interpreter next to him. Bet he didn’t sign up for this. The operators call it flying it into the X. Heavy shit, huh.”

The interpreter was a Pakistani, his face obscured by a black ski mask. Tom knew that his whole family would be killed if he was ever recognized.

The screen was split into quarters, with different images appearing from the various cameras, including those mounted on the Black Hawks’ fuselages. Briefly, Tom wondered what his first words to her would be. Whether it would be appropriate to apologize or simply say he was glad to see her alive? But what if they found her dead already? What if the plan failed at the last moment and she was killed or terribly injured? What would he say or do then? he thought.

As the amber LED lights were cut, he spent the next few minutes zoning out.

“They’re moving in,” said Crane, breaking into Tom’s thoughts.

Tom looked down towards Crane’s lap at the live feeds. “The Black Hawks are shaking a lot,” he said, watching one of the helicopters hover above the fort’s flat roof as the other lowered down to about ten metres above the courtyard. Each had a sniper aiming a suppressed rifle out of the cabin’s open side door, scanning the rescue site for any sign of a fighter.

“Uplift of trapped air,” Crane said. “It’ll be fine. The Delta work top down, bottom up, and converge in the middle. Smooth and fast, smooth and fast. A breacher blows down a door, then the fire teams enter. They take out the resistance. The main dangers are trip wires, IEDs and blind firing around walls. If the whole place isn’t rigged with Semtex, it’ll be fine. Don’t worry. If she’s there, we’ll find her.”

At least Crane is still upbeat, Tom thought. He just hoped he had a right to be, despite the man’s previous misgivings.

On screen, he watched Sawyer lead the assault on the ground. He fast-roped adroitly in leather mitts some seven metres from the bar jutting out from Black Hawk’s fuselage, landing into a swirl of dust and small stones. After being propelled forward by the rotor wash, he took point in the dark courtyard, adjusting his headphones before speaking into his cheek mic. The main building was directly ahead of him, a few outbuildings and vehicle ports left and right. He scanned around with his M4A1 carbine, fixed with a thermal scope and red-dot laser, his four-tube night-vision goggles allowing peripheral vision, but making him look as if he’d landed from another solar system.

After the main interpreter sprained an ankle on the descent and a medic had his ill-secured backpack almost torn off by the wash, the assault teams panned out and ran forward, their torsos clad in sixty-pound ballistic plates. The live feed showed a serious of controlled explosions, bursts of automatic fire and swift movement.

“Alpha three down. Medevac,” Sawyer shouted, looking over at an operator seven metres from him, his body splayed on the ground.

With that, another Delta was blown into the air three metres in front of Sawyer. He landed heavily, his legs a twisted mess. The operators couldn’t use their fragmentation grenades, because they had no idea where the secretary was being held. But the local fighters were using them to devastating effect. That and a triangulation of small-arms fire.

“Jesus,” Tom said.

The movement ratcheted up to something approaching frantic. Gunfire crackled and breaching charges erupted. A flurry of tracer rounds flew through the air from a corner turret and, a few seconds later, there was a massive explosion coupled with a white flash. Tom heard the muted voices of the men on the ground.

“Salt Two down,” said Sawyer. “A bird’s down. A bird’s down.”

“Shit!” Tom said.

With that, an Apache hovered before blowing off the turret. A funnel of flame exploded upward from the black smoke ball, the smashed clay bricks showering down onto the courtyard. Tom thought it might as well have been made of balsa wood for all the protection it had afforded.

“Wow,” Crane said. “See that? Got those RPGs for damn sure.”

As the operators moved into the main building they began to clear the warren of corridors. Their eyes were covered by helmet-mounted NVGs as they aimed suppressed, desert-tan HK416 assault rifles and Colt carbines, assaulting the building from top and bottom, just as Crane had said they would. The insurgents fell away like ghosts, or buckled under double taps to the head and body from relatively close quarters, after they were fixed with IR lasers. Once a section was cleared, an assaulter shouted, “Move,” and his teammate would shout, “Moving,” before taking a step. It was precise. Calculated.

Outside, a second Apache fired a rocket at the far left-hand side of the surrounding wall of the fort compound, smashing a gaping hole in the clay bricks.

“There ain’t enough room to put the Chinooks down in the courtyard and the gate is likely to be rigged. Hence the hole. We’re going in,” Crane barked. “And put your goggles on or you’ll be picking grit out of your eyes for a week.”

Tom felt a rush of adrenalin. He’d been in combat zones many times, but this was something else.