away.
King kept waiting.
The next sound he heard was of something wet sliding across stone. In his mind’s eye, he could see the zombies dragging their victims to the charnel pile. He followed their actions as best he could, and roughly pinpointed the location where the noises stopped. When he heard nothing more, he moved from his hiding place and struck out across the darkness.
Once more, his instincts led him true. His searching hands, and in no small measure, his sense of smell, led him to the heap of decaying bodies that had evidently become a food source for the zombies. Mixed in with the smell of decay, he detected the coppery smell of fresh blood and the odor of recently fired weapons, and after some trial and error, his hands encountered something that wasn’t flesh, but rather hard plastic-the butt-stock of an assault weapon. He kept probing until he found what he was really looking for-the dead commando’s night vision goggles.
As best he could tell, it was a military standard A/N PVS-14 monocular night optic device. He held it to his right eye and worked the power switch to reset the device and turn it on. After a moment or two, the interior of the cave was revealed to him, rendered in a murky monochrome green.
The zombies had resumed working in the bones, but their ranks had been reduced by three and two of the survivors appeared to be bleeding from wounds to their extremities, wounds that would likely prove fatal in the short term. The floor was stained with blood and littered with shell casings, but King also spied a discarded M-4 carbine. He turned back to the stack of bodies, and wrestled one of the dead commandos out of his load-carrying vest. A quick check showed four full thirty-round magazines in the ammo pouch, along with two fragmentation grenades and a gaudy, oversized Rambo-style combat knife. With the night vision device strapped in place and wearing the vest, he crept past the oblivious zombies, collecting the carbine as he made his way out of the clearing.
He expected, at any moment, to encounter a second assault team, but that did not happen. He made it as far as the cave entrance before spying two figures silhouetted against the opening. He drew back quickly, and then hastened to the far end of the tunnel, a plan already taking shape in his mind.
King knew that eventually they would want to find out why their comrades had failed to report back, but he didn’t have time to wait them out. He needed a diversion, something to draw the rest of the team into the cave.
When he reached the edge of the elephant graveyard, he did not circle around as before, but instead climbed onto the piled skeletons, scrambling to the top of the nest of bones that were as thick as tree trunks. From this vantage, he took out one of the grenades, armed it, and hurled it out across the graveyard.
Five seconds later, the cavern resounded with an enormous thump. King felt the bones beneath him ripple with the concussive force, and a few seconds later, a shower of debris rained down on him, but his perch remained more or less stable. He nevertheless kept his head down, and once again waited to see if his plan would work.
It did. Two more commandos wearing night-vision devices entered the tunnel and raced down to investigate the blast.
King decided not to snipe them from his perch. If he failed to kill both men quickly, he would lose the advantage he had created with the diversion. Instead, he let the men pass by, and when they had, he dropped down to the cavern floor and hastened up the tunnel.
From the cavern entrance, he surveyed the dark landscape. A helicopter was parked a hundred meters away, and a single figure, presumably the pilot, lurked nearby, calmly smoking a cigarette. From a distance, the man didn’t appear to be wearing night-vision goggles. King crept across the open area, watching to see if the pilot would notice his approach, but the man remained oblivious until it was too late. King clubbed him senseless with the butt of the carbine and left him on the ground alongside the chopper.
It was, King now saw, a Bell 206 JetRanger, one of the most popular commercial helicopters in service. As part of his Special Forces training, King had learned how to fly the military variant-the Kiowa OH-58-and although it had been a few years, once in the pilot’s seat, it all came back to him. He started flipping switches and felt a thrill of exhilaration as the turbine engine started powering up.
The lights on the instrument panel flared brightly in his night-vision display, but he kept the device turned on and simply shut his right eye when it was necessary to look at the panel. A minute later, he gave the collective control lever a nudge, and as the rotor blades tilted and started pushing air, the helicopter lightened and lifted off the ground. As soon as it was hovering, he pushed the cyclic forward and the Bell shot ahead, across the floor of the valley.
As his forward velocity increased, the helicopter got more and more lift, and soon was climbing into the night sky. He scanned in all directions, and quickly located the running lights of the first helicopter near the western horizon, already forty or fifty miles away. Without the added weight of passengers, he would be able to push the throttle a little harder and close that gap.
He didn’t know what he was going to do when he caught up to them, but by his best estimate, he had about thirty minutes to come up with a plan.
22.
Fulbright’s face grew dark as he received the status report from the assault team he’d left behind. Sara’s headset wasn’t wired into the external comms, but she had no trouble interpreting the message written in his scowl. Not only was Jack still alive, but he was fighting back. She tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her smile.
Fulbright must have noticed because an evil gleam appeared in his eyes. “Patch me through to our contact in the Ethiopian Air Force. There’s an unauthorized aircraft out here that they need to know about.”
He moved the mic away from his lips and Sara saw that his smile was back. “Your boyfriend should have kept his feet on the ground.”
23.
The two ETAF Russian-made Sukhoi Su-25 fighter jets approached from behind King and struck without warning.
Fortunately for him, the pilots had been instructed to engage with guns only. With an equivalent price tag of more than $70,000, the Vympel R-73 infrared guided air-to-air missiles they carried were deemed too costly to be used as a first-strike measure against a slow moving and evidently unarmed helicopter. Absent that consideration, he would have died without even knowing that he was in danger. Instead, the lead plane greeted him with a short burst from its Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-30-2 30 millimeter cannon.
Eighteen of the twenty-one rounds fired in that initial volley arced harmlessly past the JetRanger. Two of the rounds were phosphorous-tipped tracers that lit up the display of King’s night-vision device like streaks of lightning. But even as those rounds were flashing by, betraying the presence of hostile aircraft, the other three rounds hit their target. The helicopter shuddered as the projectiles, as thick as flashlight batteries and nearly three times as long, penetrated the aluminum and Lexan airframe. Even though they struck neither flesh nor critical systems, King felt the heat and concussive force on his skin as the rounds passed through the cockpit, far too close for comfort.
King had no idea who was shooting at him, or even what kind of aircraft was involved, but he knew luck alone had saved him. He was an easy target. He hastily reduced the collective pitch and the helicopter immediately dropped almost straight down. More tracers lit up the night, flashing harmlessly overhead. He looked up and saw, blazing like a miniature suns, the engine exhaust of the two attack planes as they flew through the space where he had been only a moment before. The jets arced across the night sky, maneuvering to come around for another pass at him.
The planes’ superior speed was both an advantage and a liability. Because they were so much faster than the helicopter, they could attack from almost anywhere, but at the same time that speed would make it very difficult to
