Cobra Strike (32 page)

“Ask them how they know the Pasdaran traveled by helicopter,” Mike told Jed.

When Jed found out, he answered, “There are forty to fifty choppers on a landing zone north of a small village ahead of us.
We will be able to see them from the top of the next ridge, but that’s also the point at which we can expect to run into these
Revolutionary Guards. They say we should come back with them inside Afghanistan and return when this antismuggling crusade
is over. The men who came with us are going back, too, I think.”

“They should,” Mike said flatly. “But we go on.”

His men looked at him.

“Haven’t you wondered why the Russians haven’t pursued us over the Iran border?” Mike asked them. “It’s hardly because they’ve
suddenly grown scrupulous about borders. It’s certainly not because they’re afraid of the Iranians. I think they’ve made a
deal with the Ayatollah. Khomeini has probably promised to return us to them in Afghanistan if the Russians don’t cross his
borders. The Russians believe he can keep his promise because he has no rebels to give us shelter and we have a nine-hundred-mile
journey before us to get to Iraq. I’d say the Ayatollah’s
chances were pretty good, too, except for one thing. He doesn’t know us.”

The mercs and Institute men all cheered except for Baker, who said now that they were in Iran, they should negotiate with
the Iranians.

“Sure, Baker,” Mike responded, “they would love to negotiate with us for two or three years in jail cells.”

“The Iranians would never try a stunt like that again,” Baker snapped.

“I agree, they probably wouldn’t,” Campbell conceded. “They’d hand us over to the Russians instead, and both they and the
Russians would deny that we had ever entered Iran. We’d be back to being captured inside Afghanistan and the Soviets would
be happy again. Jed, you tell our smuggler friends here that this is no antismuggling crusade. Tell them that these Revolutionary
Guards are after us, not them. They should stay inside their own border until we get away.”

The Afghans wished them luck and offered them weapons and ammo from their own meager supply. Instead Mike gave them some of
the team’s unneeded armaments, and they departed happy.

Mike asked in a serious voice, “Did any man accept any opium?”

“No, Mike,” Lance said in a loud voice. “It was offered and I refused.”

“Anyone else?”

Most had been offered some and all had refused.

“Good,” Mike said. “That way maybe we’ll stay alive.”

They saw the landing zone from the top of the ridge. Mike observed it through his binoculars. His lenses traveled over the
camouflaged fuselages of the Huey choppers. The red, white, and green “target” symbol on their sides and large national flags
of the same colors in horizontal stripes near the tail rotor defeated the purposes of the camouflage but looked good, which
was perhaps all that mattered. Mike knew how to fly a Huey, more or less, from some bad experiences in Southeast Asia when
he had to fly one despite no training. They were not easy to fly, but then, no chopper was.

He didn’t want a Huey. Ten men aboard a Huey was a heavy load. The chopper’s range was 230 miles, or 460 miles one way, which
was only half the distance they had to travel if they took the shortest way possible. He’d take a Huey in a pinch, but they
needed something with a longer range.

His binoculars settled on a familiar shape, a Sikorsky HH-3. This chopper would be ideal, if it weren’t for one thing—he wasn’t
sure how to fly it.

“Anyone know how to fly a Sikorsky HH-3?” he asked.

Silence.

“Damn. Too bad. Especially since we’re going to use one. It’s got a range of about seven-fifty klicks, as far as I remember.
It has a twin turbine and can go up ten thousand feet or more. Last one I was in was a thirty-seat troop transport in Nam.
But I’m fairly sure the Navy used them for air-sea rescues and as a submarine hunter/killer. You sure none of you can fly
her? Too bad.”

Mike’s attention was called by Andre to a lookout point farther along the top of the ridge. From there they could see the
Revolutionary Guards scouring the scrublands at the base of the ridge on which they stood. A few groups had climbed higher.
They kept in constant motion, like restless gangs in a city park, not sure what to do with themselves. Despite their apparent
lack of military training, they could still be dangerous because of their numbers and because they all carried automatic assault
rifles. Mike selected the shortest route from the hills to the landing zone as a point about a mile north along the ridge.
Accordingly he had the team retreat, make its way north, and then reclimb the ridge. While they were doing this Andre mentioned
to Mike that Baker had started acting up again.

“He admits himself that he can’t fly the damn thing,” Baker said to Crippenby, Winston, and Turner. “Even if he knew how,
he would have no chance of getting it across Iran to the Iraqi war zone. If the Iranians don’t shoot it out of the sky, the
Iraqis will. Campbell has been brilliant so far, I’ll grant him that, but his success has gone to his head. He doesn’t know
when to stop. We don’t need any more life-endangering heroics. Now is the time to talk. We’re all
Institute men, so we have a deeper perspective than these soldier-of-fortune types, who are all brawn and no brains. Their
only answer to every situation is violent action.^ I would hope you are more civilized.”

“Stuff it up your ass, Baker,” Turner said, and walked on ahead of them.

“Don’t mind him,” Baker said. “He’s not part of the Nanticoke’s brain trust.”

“Turner has more horse sense than you’ll ever have, Baker,” Crippenby said. “All I’ve seen of you in Afghanistan is someone
sulking like a kid and being a help to no one. Yet the moment Campbell gets you safely out of Afghanistan, you start mouthing
off as if you were the one who led us through it all. If you hadn’t been such a louse up to this point, I’d be tempted to
listen to you because, yes, I think Campbell is being reckless. But if I have to choose between his crazy maneuvers and your
bullying sulks, I’ll have to go with the one who brought us this far, won’t I?”

After Crippenby had walked away Winston slapped Baker on the shoulder, and said, “That was a reasonable response, and one
you deserved, David. Better come along and hold your peace until something goes wrong.”

“That Sikorsky HH-3 is what will go wrong,” Baker predicted grimly.

But he wasn’t thinking clearly. First of all they had to get to the Sikorsky.

Mike broke out a supply of Belgian HE-RFL-60N antipersonnel rifle grenades. “Remember, you don’t have to hit someone. These
are just as effective behind someone taking cover. It breaks into five hundred pieces and is lethal out to eight meters from
the point of impact. But it will cut the shit out of them out to fifty meters. So spread them around. The range is about three
hundred meters, so we’ll flatten the bastards out as we move and empty our magazines into any that survive.”

“Let’s do it,” Waller growled, his husky voice turned savage.

“Campbell, as soon as we kill them, we will have lost
our negotiating power.” It was Baker. He stood up out of cover. “I am not prepared to sacrifice—”

Verdoux lunged at him, but Baker dodged him and ran forward, downhill, waving his arms to get the attention of the Revolutionary
Guards below. “Peace! Peace! We come in the name of peace! We must speak with the Ayatollah Khomeini!”

Campbell pulled the rifle grenade from the muzzle of his Kalashnikov, fired a burst of three shots from the hip, and brought
down Baker with two bullets in his right thigh.

“Winston! Turner! Carry him!” Campbell shouted, pushing the rifle grenade back in the barrel of his gun. “Verdoux! Nolan!
Cover them and escort them! Hardwick, Murphy, Waller, Crippenby, ready your grenades! All right, men, see those choppers?
Let’s go!”

The team moved downhill at a run and enveloped Winston and Turner, who were carrying Baker, screaming with pain, none too
gently between them. They took some light, wildly aimed fire from the surprised Revolutionary Guards, but the mercs used their
time and energy in covering ground. Only when they were quite close did Campbell release the first antipersonnel rifle grenade.
It burst a couple of hundred yards directly in front of them, and its hundreds of white-hot metal fragments tore through the
flesh of the surrounding Iranians. Four other grenades followed, each man finding his own area, cutting a swath in front of
the team.

They were soon running among the screaming, dying, struggling Pasdaran. They had asked to be martyrs for the Islamic revolution,
but it seemed to Campbell that most seemed not too happy to have their wish granted. Having emptied and replaced a thirty-round
magazine, he replaced it and fitted another grenade in the barrel.

The second wave of grenades was even more devastating than the first, because the Pasdaran were thicker on the ground. It
was no longer possible to avoid stepping on the dead and dying.

As always, Campbell was astounded at the multiple slaughter it was possible for a trained, disciplined, small unit with a
defined objective to inflict on a large, undisciplined,
poorly trained mass that did not possess a clearly defined plan of action to meet the circumstances.

They gained the chopper landing zone without sustaining any casualties and used the fuselages of the parked Hueys as cover.

“This way!” Lance yelled, having found a Sikorsky HH-3.

As they ran, they passed two Iranians in flight suits. Mike noticed that IMPERIAL was poorly inked out on their prerevolutionary
badges. They had holstered pistols on their hips, but they made a show of putting their hands behind their backs and looking
away. These armed forces men seemed less than upset at the beating the Revolutionary Guards had taken and probably resented
having had to ferry them here.

“Bob! Lance! If I can’t get this mother started, you two go back for them!” Campbell shouted as he ran to the Sikorsky.

Mike sat in the cockpit and tried to “think helicopter.” He got the twin turbines started with no trouble while the others
were still climbing in and passing Baker on board. It was the disk formed by the revolving rotor blades that actually flew.
The fuselage or main body of the chopper went along only because it was suspended from this disk by a mast. That was the big
difference between flying a chopper and a fixed-wing plane. Here you were flying a spinning disk with dead weight hanging
from it.

Mike reached to the left of the pilot’s seat and gently pulled up on the collective control stick. This increased the pitch
angles of the main rotor blades and caused the disk, along with the chopper attached to it, to rise.

“Check the gauges, Andre,” Mike commanded. “How are we on fuel?”

The throttle twist-grip was on the end of the collective stick, and Mike had to give the engines more throttle as he raised
the stick for takeoff. Too much or too little could produce dangerous effects. Needless to say, Mike had no idea what was
too much or too little in this Sikorsky.

The cyclic control stick was placed vertically between his legs. Moving this stick in any direction caused the rotating
blades to increase in pitch and move higher on one half of their cycle and feather on the other half. This in turn caused
the disk to tilt in the direction in which the cyclic stick was pushed, and thus the chopper moved in that direction.

As the main motor spins, torque revolves the fuselage slowly in the opposite direction. The tail rotor controls this movement
by pushing the tail sideways against the torque. The left pedal increases the tail rotor pitch and pushes the tail to the
right and the nose to the left. The right pedal produced the opposite effect. The left-hand throttle had to be adjusted in
time with these maneuvers, more power with the left pedal, less with the right.

That was it. Nothing much more to it.

Andre yelled that they had full fuel tanks, and as far as he could see and understand, everything was in order.

Mike gave it throttle with his left hand and gently eased up the collective stick. The big chopper jumped off the ground like
a person stung by a hornet. The rotor blades roared crazily over their heads, and the entire craft began to vibrate and rattle.
Then it began sinking and rising in sharp stomach-churning jerks. The more Campbell tried to correct this up-and-down motion
with the collective stick, the more pronounced it became.

Mike decided that the only way out was up, so he raised the collective stick and gave it more throttle, trying to keep it
straight with the left pedal as he eased on the cyclic stick to see if he could stop the now violent vibrations. About twenty
feet above the ground, both engines cut out and the chopper began to fall.

Campbell pushed the collective stick all the way down. This flattened the pitch angle of the rotors and allowed them to continue
spinning, which provided lift. If he had not gotten the collective stick down instantly, the chopper would have dropped like
a stone. As it was, they bounced hard on their three wheels onto the ground.

“That’s called an autorotation,” Campbell said in the calm voice that signaled things were going bad. “Anyone who wishes to
discuss things with the Ayatollah Khomeini should leave the craft now.”

The others were too shaken to understand a word he was saying.

The engines roared to life again, and Campbell gave them the throttle and raised the collective stick in his left hand. As
the Sikorsky lifted off the ground this time, its nose made an abrupt right-angle turn. Then it started moving in odd directions
in short, fast darts, as if hysterical—yet all the time it kept rising. At length it moved westward, unsteadily but definitely
under way by this time.

A bullet ripped up through the floor near Mike’s right foot “Hey, we’re under fire!”

Andre smiled and pointed to a number of other bullet holes in the sides and floor. “Mike, we have been for some time. Nobody
wanted to mention it in case it distracted you.”