With a slightly dampened boom, the grenade exploded, shredding the men inside and blanketing the chopper in thick, gray smoke.
The thumping of more helos from behind sent McAllen’s gaze skyward. For a moment, his heart sank as he assumed more enemy troops were inbound.
But no. He had to blink to be sure he was seeing them: a pair of civilian choppers with riflemen strapped in and leaning out their open bay doors, already opening fire on the two Russian helos below.
McAllen had to hand it to the SF guys, who’d managed to recruit those pilots and get some shooters up there. Sure, it was amateur close air support, but he’d take it.
Palladino let his first round fly, the rifle emitting a crack of thunder that rattled the buildings. He was targeting the crew members of the third helo. His round punched a gaping hole in the canopy and blew the pilot to pieces.
That bird wasn’t going anywhere now. It dropped back toward the tarmac, hit hard, then began to bank erratically over the grass, as Gutierrez raked it with more fire.
The bay door popped, and a few Spetsnaz infantry leapt out, hit the ground, and came up firing—
But they were quickly cut down by the riflemen in the air, helos sweeping over them, rounds sparking as they ricocheted off the street.
McAllen was ready to call it day. Khaki was giving him the high sign: the tank’s full, let’s boogie.
“All right, Outlaw Team,” McAllen began.
The sudden hissing and sparking of new fire on the wall behind him, on the ground, the snow, and over his head sent him diving onto his gut.
And just beyond the chopper, in the forest, came at least a dozen Spetsnaz infantry, probably two full squads, with one guy dropping to his knees, balancing a tubelike weapon on his shoulder.
McAllen’s mouth fell open. He recognized an RPO-A Shmel, or “Bumblebee,” when he saw one. The weapon fired a thermobaric projectile utilizing advanced fuel-air explosive techniques. Some described the weapon as a flamethrower, but it was more like a rocket with a flamethrower’s aftereffects, burning for a very long time.
The guy aimed at the fully fueled Longranger.
“Get out of there!” McAllen hollered to Khaki, Rule, and Friskis. “Get out!” At the same time, he cut loose with his XM9, directing all of his fire on the guy with the Bumblebee.
Squinting against the smoke from his barrel wafting into his eyes, McAllen watched the guy fall forward and drop the rocket, just as Khaki, Rule, and Friskis came racing toward him, gunfire raking their paths.
Gutierrez swung his rifle around and began to suppress the oncoming troops, but McAllen already saw they couldn’t hold them back for long.
And yet another Spetsnaz troop picked up the Bumblebee and was leveling it on his shoulder.
McAllen fired at that guy, dropped him, then another salvo sent him rolling to the left, out of the bead. He felt a dull pressure on his shoulders as a few rounds struck his Crye integrated body armor, but he was okay.
“God
As his men continued, still returning fire, McAllen got to his feet and did likewise. He chanced a look back, saw yet another guy shouldering the Bumblebee.
There was no one to stop him now.
McAllen sprinted forward, reached the corner, and ducked around to his left, just as a massive explosion struck like thunder from a hundred rain clouds.
A gasp later, the concussion wave struck, lifting him a meter into the air, then knocking him flat onto his belly.
With the whoosh and roar of flames still resounding, accompanied by an unbearable gasoline stench that seemed to clog the hot air, McAllen felt a hand latch onto his wrist and pull him to his feet.
“They blew up my goddamned chopper!” shouted Khaki, releasing him. “They blew it up!”
Just then the two civilian birds swooped down, riflemen ready to strafe the oncoming infantry behind them.
“Forget the bird. I’ll buy you another one!” cried McAllen. “Let’s get some cover!”
Ahead lay a garage, home of the airport’s fire crew. They swept along the main terminal, headed for that—
One of the terminal doors opened, and Black Bear appeared. “Marines, get in here now!”
“Do what he says,” hollered McAllen.
They filed into the terminal, stealing a moment to catch their breaths.
Black Bear smiled, removed his cigar. “Guess you boys will be staying awhile.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
While they usually packed light, Sergeant Nathan Vatz’s team, along with the rest of the company, had opted to haul some of the bigger gear up to High Level, especially when faced with a cold weather operation against a numerically superior force.
Fortunately for them, some of that equipment had made it out of the C-130 before the missile had struck. Their AT4 and Javelin had survived, along with a couple of other surprises still waiting for the Russians.
The boys at the airport had taken the AT4. Vatz’s team had the Javelin, and he tensed now as the missile, fired from the other side of town, dropped like Thor’s hammer on top of the Russian helo.
Well, the U.S. government would have to make some reparations to the townsfolk of High Level, Alberta—
Because the helo burst apart, raining ragged pieces of metal, tubes, and wires onto the surrounding buildings. Doors folded in, and large glass windows shattered into the road. Still more brick facades crumbled, and a steel street sign was cut down like a blade of grass.
More shrapnel and other debris hurtled into the second chopper, whose troops were already jumping down, a couple immediately succumbing to the blast.
Vatz firmly gripped his pistol-like combat weapon, nicknamed Lethality Central, LC for short.
The first 15mm, cold-launched, intelligent-seeker round streaked away from one of the weapon’s five tubes, homed in on that chopper’s open door, and punched through several infantry.
Vatz triggered two more rounds, saving the 4.6 mm projectiles in tube number five for close encounters of the final kind.
One of the locals down below ran out in the street and rolled a grenade beneath the chopper. The pilot couldn’t achieve liftoff in time, and the blast sent him banking sideways. With a grinding, crunching, glass-shattering racket, the bird chewed its way into the local courthouse. The rotors snapped off and spun away like knives thrown in a circus act as the helo’s nose vanished inside the building.
Another grenade, this one launched by Vatz’s engineer, dropped beside the helo, the detonation opening up the bird’s fuel tanks, and the fires quickly rose, triggering several more explosions.
Wind-whipped smoke appeared in the distant north. Vatz seized his binoculars and swore as one of the Russian helos fired rockets on the main roadblock. He’d been hoping they’d leave that obstacle to the mechanized infantry, but sometimes luck — and bullets — ran out.
Those local guys manning the roadblock couldn’t do much against that bird, and they wouldn’t last long. Vatz already felt the pang of their loss.
“Bali, this is Black Bear, over.”
The voice surprised Vatz, and he switched his Cross Com to an image piped in from Samson’s helmet camera. “Bear, this is Bali, go ahead, over.”
“Communications are back. Go figure. Anyway, we’ve taken out four enemy helos, but we got twenty, thirty Spetsnaz guys on the ground from at least two we didn’t get, moving toward the terminal, over.”
“Roger that. We destroyed our two helos. Still got one out by the northern roadblock. No location for the rest, over.”
“Yeah, I see the smoke.”
