entrance.
Not being a heat-seeking missile, the RPG’s 1.7-kilogram high-explosive antitank round struck the helo below the right engine mount’s cowling. Black smoke poured out of the helo, which immediately began losing power. In an instantaneous decision, the pilot jettisoned the right auxiliary fuel tank that had already been hit by the range- finding sniper bullet. The tank dropped like a bomb, but the pilot was right to release it, for now he could see that the tank was afire. David felt the whoosh of hot air as the tank plummeted past him, no more than ten feet away, a second before the chopper rose another fifty feet. The burning tank, smashing into the ground, exploded, vomiting out an enormous pear-shaped orange flame that engulfed the cave’s entrance, incinerating Sanchez and Jam’s inert body.
“I’m going down!” yelled the Pave’s medic, grabbing his trauma pack. The helo’s ramp was opening again, its.50 caliber now joined by the helo’s right-side 7.62 minigun.
“Go!” yelled the pilot, who fought against the fierce winds coming up from the ravine, which had no doubt been strengthened by the auxiliary tank’s explosion. He realized, as the medic must have, that any attempt to winch Brentwood up farther would spell disaster, given the helo’s severe “rockabye” motion. Either Brentwood would be smashed against the rock face or, delaying the Pave, make the helo a sitting target.
“Disengage!” the medic yelled at Brentwood.
David didn’t have to be told twice, both men falling within seconds of one another from the SPIE line, ten feet to the ground. David rolled onto his injured arm, the pain shooting so fast to his brain that he momentarily passed out, the medic dragging him behind the cover of boulders twenty feet from the cave’s entrance. David’s pain was so intense, however, that a moan escaped him. “Shut up!” the medic told the Medal of Honor winner, injecting him with a vial of morphine. He taped David’s arm and started an IV drip, the wind almost blowing off his Kevlar helmet, which was pelted by small pebbles and dust as fine as talc. But all the medic could think of now was whether the Pave pilot had had time to send a Mayday to Tora Bora, and if so, had they heard him?
“Goddamn CIA,” he cursed. They’d given the Afghans hundreds of heat-seeking Stingers to fight the Soviets, and now the missiles were being used to kill Americans. The world was crazy. And now the Russians were helping the U.S. fight the terrorists.
He checked Brentwood’s pulse. It wasn’t good. Why in hell had the helo stopped dropping flares to avoid Stingers? Probably, the medic guessed, because the copilot was conserving them for the run back over hostile areas to Tora Bora. It occurred to him then that if al Qaeda got to him and Brentwood, he could barter his medical skills and supplies for his survival. “You goddamned coward!” he berated himself aloud. “You’re Special Forces, for Christ’s sake. One of Freeman’s boys. Get a grip!”
He saw David Brentwood struggling with his left hand for the mouthpiece to his camelback, but the water sack had been lacerated either by the firefight in the cave or by shrapnel from the explosions of the helo’s jettisoned fuel tank. The medic took off his own camelback but warned David, “Just a sip.”
The helo, now free of any encumbrance, rose high and, barely missed by another RPG round, banked sharply to the left for twelve hundred meters, beyond the maximum range of an RPG. From there, the Pave, hovering, its machine guns roaring, aided by infrared searchlights, began raking the razorback, now that the helo had more freedom to move. “Winds are dying down,” noted the pilot. “Maybe we could have another go?”
“Why not?” said the copilot, sounding braver than he felt.
“Missile three o’clock low!” shouted the pilot, hauling hard on the Pave’s yoke, narrowly avoiding the RPG. The Pave’s gunners laid down suppressing fire left to right, the helo banking hard toward the ravine, the copilot warning the medic this would be the last attempt.
The medic was frantically lashing himself to Brentwood when the weighted SPIE line thumped him in the back, sending his helmet flying, knocking him and Brentwood to the ground. “Jesus Christ!” But he was quick enough to grab the line and clip on. The line, now slacker, dragged past him. The Pave’s pilot tried to ease the Pave up, but despite the helo’s heavy enfilade, another RPG was coming straight at him. He dropped the helo abruptly, and the medic and Brentwood, who had been rising before, were now dumped. For a moment the medic thought the SPIE line had been jettisoned again to save the chopper. The RPG exploded high above them on the ravine’s cliff face, sending a rain of rock fragments down on the two men. The whack on Brentwood’s helmet was so loud that the helo’s winch man swore he heard it above the rotor slap. The baseball-size fragment that struck the helmetless medic wasn’t heard by anyone on the Pave as the helo rose quickly, simultaneously winching the two men up.
The dust storm it created sent a gritty, eye-closing wind over the terrorists, who nevertheless kept firing, the Pave taking several hits, none fatal. The ramp machine gunner, shot in the right boot, was unaware of it until he felt the warmth of his foot, the boot filling with blood. Brentwood was dragged hard over the fuselage’s lip. The medic, though none of the crew realized it at the time, was dying from a massive hemorrhage in his brain.
CHAPTER FIVE
As the five-man crew of one of the Port Angeles Bruisers — as the thirty-foot-long rigid hull inflatable boats were unofficially known — readied to put to sea, the crew of the
“Damn!” said the weapons officer. “Looks like we’ve got a lem—”
Then they heard and felt the blast of the 650-pound high-explosive warheads, followed by the awful sound of bulkheads buckling and collapsing like the bones of some huge prehistoric animal in its death throes.
How many were dying?
Rorke could see the question written on the faces of his young crew, now that the excitement of the hit had passed.
“Relax, gentlemen,” he announced, smiling. “We didn’t deep six anyone. Just a rusty target hulk rigged to emit hostile acoustics. You did the
“Emergency blow, aye, sir.”
The ballast control operator activated the two “mushrooms”—ballast control valves — the rapid gush of air from the sub’s air banks to her ballast tanks so alarming that it made her crew tense again.
Alicia Mayne could see the men visibly relax. She felt it too. As one of the Navy’s preeminent torpedo researchers she’d known that at some point during
“Why couldn’t you have told me beforehand?” she asked Rorke pointedly, albeit with a smile.
“Thought you might alert the crew,” he replied. “Take the edge off them.”
Now she
“No, no,” he said, “not tip them off verbally. It’s a person’s body language. Just like you’re telling me now how pissed you are at me. Besides,” he added cheekily, “I thought you might enjoy the suspense.”
“
“I figured the experience would give you a greater appreciation of what a torpedo launch is like,” he said. “Telemetry is only one part of it. Your knowledge of the human factor could be just as valuable in improving the new Mark 50.” He paused. “You notice the strain on the men in combat control? In the weapons officer’s voice? When those boys — their average age is twenty-two — are sending out all that information through the wire, one slip, one nanosecond of lost focus, could mean our fish hits a hostile a second too late, giving the enemy time to launch. And
