Light Up the Night (2 page)

Thankfully, out at the edge of town where the hostages were supposedly being held, there were few power lines and almost all of the buildings were single story, a lot of tin roofs and a lot with no roof at all. So there was room to maneuver. Even in a brownout of dust beaten aloft by the chopper's rotor downwash, if you were a dozen meters up, you would be in the clear. At least from hitting any obstacles.

Early in the night, the tin of the roofs would have shown as bright square projections on the inside of her helmet's visor because of the release of the sun's heat. The ADAS camera gear laid an infrared-amplified image across her bullet-resistant plastic, so clear that it was almost like daylight.

All the press, and most of the military, thought that the Advanced Distributed Aperture System was just an idea in testing. SOAR had seen it, worked on the quiet with Raytheon to take it to the next level, and installed it. It was frickin' amazing. It was to night-vision goggles what NVGs had been to squinting really hard. And because the cameras were mounted outside the chopper, there were no blind spots, not even straight down. She could see out in every direction as if she were just sitting in the sky with nothing around her. She could even see most of the way through the dust of rotor-born brownouts.

A quick blink and she could switch her focus to seeing directly through her visor to the world beyond her helmet. But almost everything she needed was projected inside, including the heat signature of the tin roofs.

By 3:00 a.m. the sun's heat had dissipated, and the only heat signatures on the roofs now came from the bodies inside. It wasn't much, but the tin glowed a little bit with heat if the space was inhabited. Otherwise they looked solid black.

One of the hottest roofs was close by the compound, the one they'd been told to target. That meant the information was right; a lot of people radiating a lot of body heat under that one particular roof.

Even as Trisha pulled up to hover in a guard position fifty feet in the air, she could see people running from that building, being herded by a man carrying a rifle. The briefing had warned them there was an embedded friendly doing the inside setup. If there hadn't been, they'd have had to bring more choppers loaded with more Special Operations Forces. But this guy was apparently a one-man rescue machine.

They didn't reveal any of his details, other than he was absolutely trustworthy and be careful not to kill him. A “high-value asset.” What kind of a crazy idiot, high-value or otherwise, embedded himself in the Somali pirate community? Probably some testosterone-poisoned jerk, some serious adrenaline junkie with a death wish.

Trisha flew the weaponized attack version of a Little Bird helicopter, so she hovered close but didn't go to ground. She wasn't designed for passengers, just a pilot, a copilot, and enough weapons to rip anyone a new hole if they messed with her. The Killer Egg, as it was often called, could take down tanks that were fifty times the weight of her bird. The body of the chopper might be goofily close to being egg-shaped, but that didn't make it one bit less of a “killer.”

Merchant
and
Mad
Max
were MH-6Ms, tactical transport versions of the Little Bird. They could get close in and dump off four to six operators. The chopper was so small that the Special Ops guys actually sat three on a side on small, fold-down benches running along the outsides of the chopper. They were exposed to the wind, but they were fast for load and unload. They had a rope for fast descent into places that even a Little Bird helicopter couldn't land.

They came in quick and low with one Delta Force operator each, who jumped off the benches before the choppers even touched down. In moments they were shoving rescuees onto the side benches with their backs against the sides of the helicopters and tying them on. As soon as they each had four people on the benches and had slapped helmets onto the hostages' heads to protect them from the wind, the Little Birds lifted and were instantly headed back toward the beach.

The D-boys rushed the rest of them toward the
Vicious
, the transport Black Hawk that had grounded a little farther away. Unable to fit inside the courtyard, it had landed outside the front gate.

“
May!
Three o'clock.” Wrench, the call sign of Air Mission Commander Stevenson, still sitting back on the ship they had launched from, called down the warning. He had a spy drone circling a thousand feet up and keeping an eye on them. It had taken her forever to break the desire to lean out and see if she could spot the blacked-out eyes in the sky of the high-circling “drone.” Though the military kept trying to kill off that word, everyone still used it. It was supposed to be UAV, unmanned aerial vehicle. Yeah, right. She managed not to look up for the drone because SOAR had drilled into her head to keep her attention on her own problems.

“I see it!” Trisha called back to Stevenson. She'd been hovering the chopper and letting it slowly spin on its axis so that she and Roland, her copilot, swept a complete circle of the area every six seconds. Even with that, the AMC spotted the new problem ahead of her. Man was good. She liked that.

With a slight tip of the cyclic, she got her weaponry lined up on a doorway where a whole lot of hostiles were pouring out into the compound's central courtyard.

“Do it!” she called to Roland over the intercom.

Roland fired a short burst from the M134 minigun, a three-second burst that was two hundred rounds. It chewed a line of lead and bright-green phosphor tracers in front of the bad guys. Almost as importantly, the gun had a roar like an angry dragon. It was scary as shit, even when she was the one firing it. On the ground, it heralded imminent death like a hammer blow.

Most of the “bad guys suddenly in over their heads” stumbled back against the front wall of the building. Two even tumbled back through the door where there was no wall to stop their flailing retreat. A couple guys dropped to the ground, probably shot in the legs by rounds that ricocheted off the hard-packed dirt or kicked up rocks.

That drew their attention, and their fire, upward. At least they weren't firing toward the hostage flights anymore.

Trisha rolled left and then pulled hard right, circling around behind the building. Now the front wall blocked the bad guys from a direct line of fire until they moved farther back from the building, which they'd hesitate over. They'd know that would make them even more exposed. It also served to keep their backs toward the ongoing rescue operations.

She could hear CW Lola Maloney in the
Vengeance
handling similar problems further into town with her big DAP Hawk. The Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk was the most powerful and effective heli-aviation gunship platform ever launched by any military on the planet. But it weighed almost ten times as much as her bird and moved like it. She'd take the tap dance of the Little Bird over the waltz of the DAP any day.

Trisha slid to a hover behind the building.

That's when the RPG came at her out of the back window, triggering a painfully loud audible warning system over the headphones embedded in her helmet. Someone had stayed inside, someone smart who had guessed where her first move would be. Nothing she hated more than a rocket-propelled grenade. She'd been downed in Iraq by one of those while still flying for the Screaming Eagles. It hadn't been an experience she'd enjoyed much, though she'd managed to autorotate to an okay landing. Truth be told, it had actually scared her right out of the sky until her commander, Lieutenant Beale, had booted her ass back into the air.

She shoved the collective down and drove the bird toward the ground. Even as the RPG shot by with an angry hiss of its rocket motor mere feet over her rotor and a tapering squeal of the audio warning, she leveled the bird and unleashed a pair of 2.75-inch Hydra 70 rockets into the building. One hit the wall and the other went in through the window before exploding. The tin roof spun up into the air, and the four walls blew outward in a beautiful fireball.

She climbed up through the flames and, through the screening smoke, spotted the collection of baddies in the front yard still looking for a target. About half were down with chunks of wall on them. The other half began pinging lame-ass 5.56 mm rounds off her forward windscreen.

“Take 'em!” she called—and Roland did. A five-second burst from the two miniguns bolted onto the hardpoints that stuck out either side of her bird, aimed with a little jiggle on the cyclic to make a figure-eight pattern concentrating their gunfire. That put the baddies out of action.

The clock said 3:04:03. They'd been in contact for a minute and ten seconds. The hostages should be clear by now.

Once she climbed clear of the smoke and flames, she saw that the transport Black Hawk was indeed lifting and Maloney was riding protection. The other Little Birds were long gone.

Trisha was just about to bug out when she saw the lone guy standing where the Black Hawk had just lifted.

At first she thought it might be one of their team, one of the Delta Force boys still on the ground, but he didn't have the small red shoulder-tabs that would glare in the infrared of her night vision. That would tell her he was a good guy. Nor was he a left-behind hostage, because he had a rifle.

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 rescue square at high speed.

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

***

“What the hell are you doing?” Bill shouted at the pilot who had grounded his craft with the rotor just 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 just 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 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 chopper 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 a half-dozen 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 even as he fell backward. Good patterning as well; both were probably heart shots. His AK-47 was still aimed at Bill and the chopper, 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. You started to believe that you belonged. Even though that psych condition was trained for, it was difficult to avoid.

He ducked his head and sprinted to the side of the chopper. 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, just behind the little 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 catch his next breath.

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 idiot. 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. Even with that, he made her overweight and it was a major struggle to compensate. Time to dump some 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 chopper rather than flinging him off. He'd still better hang on.

Two feet off the ground, the chopper 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 really 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 about to be shot.