funding that the UN mission represented, had wormed its way in through the back door. While CH-53 Sea Stallions had been ferrying Marines ashore yesterday, Cole and Dombrowski and their aircraft’s crew chief, Warrant Officer Palmer, had flown one of two Army UH-60 Black Hawks into Poti’s airfield.
They’d come to Georgia loaded for bear. Their Black Hawk had been equipped with ESSS ? an acronym meaning External Stores Support System. A deliberate copy of the external weapons mounts employed by Russian Hind helicopter gunships, the ESSS would let the Black Hawk ride shotgun for the UN Crisis Assessment Team’s Hip. There’d been a lot of sniping at UN air traffic over western Georgia lately, chiefly from Russian mobile antiaircraft units under the control of one or another of the militia or Russian army forces in the area; one UN helo had been shot down the week before, and two others damaged. The Army Black Hawk’s ESSS, loaded with sixteen Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, would be one hell of an incentive for those units to stay under cover and leave UN aircraft alone.
Dombrowski touched the side of his helmet, listening closely. “Uh-oh.
Here it goes.”
“What?”
“Two-seven finally checked in over the radio.” The code group referred to the Assessment Team, and their helicopter. “They’re saddling up.”
Cole glanced at his watch. “Only about two hours late. That must be a new speed record for a Crisis Team.”
The tall Pole’s frown turned into a grin. “All we have to do now is pray that nobody goes and insults the local honcho’s sister before we get out of here. They’ve got our flight plan so screwed up now I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll get back home before our enlistments expire.”
The Crisis Assessment Team had been on the move for over a week now, since long before the Americans had arrived. They were traveling from town to town throughout western Georgia, trying to determine from interviews with the locals ? and by whether or not anybody took a shot at them as they passed ? whether this wretched country had indeed been abandoned by the more organized Russian units, or whether Reds or Blues were still here in force. From what Cole had seen over the past couple of days, there wasn’t anything organized about Georgia… except possibly for the misery of its inhabitants. The towns were war-shattered, with little left but rubble and vast, sprawling, disease-ridden refugee camps and tent cities. The team they were escorting was a varied lot ? two U.S. Army officers who’d arrived with Dombrowski and Cole, two Marine officers out of MEU-25, three British army officers, a French air force man, two Turks, and an Ethiopian UN Special Envoy with the tongue-twisting name Mengistu Tzadua ? not to mention the ragged, heavily armed Georgian freedom fighter who’d insisted on accompanying the team as it made the rounds of the countryside, plus two people from the American Cable News network, a reporter and a cameraman. The whole operation was a bizarre melting pot. They could barely share ideas among themselves, much less quiz the locals on how the UN could better deliver humanitarian aid. Cole didn’t know how much more of this assignment he’d be able to put up with before he did something most undiplomatic. He was all for helping the victims of war by delivering humanitarian aid, but so far he’d seen more bureaucrats than relief workers, and it seemed like there was no end in sight.
Cole grimaced. You usually knew why you were on an op, and who your enemies were, and what the risks were likely to be, whether it was delivering food to Somalia or stopping the neo-Soviets in the snow-covered mountains of Norway. This was something totally different, however, a tangled web of crossed interests, cross purposes, and particularly unpleasant men with guns who weren’t always pleased to see the U.S. troops or UN peacekeepers.
“Here they come,” WO Chris Palmer called from the rear compartment.
“Finally!” Cole muttered, powering up the Black Hawk and gently feeding the twin T700-GE-700 turboshafts, listening to the rising whine of the rotors with a practiced ear. “Radio silent routine, people, once we’re airborne.”
Their orders had specified staying off the radios once in the air. The idea was to surprise Russian forces who might otherwise track them by their radio calls.
Moments later, another helicopter flew past, an odd-looking, ungainly beast with an elongated, rounded fuselage and prominent round windows along the sides. The Mi-8 Hip was an old Soviet design and was seen everywhere in this part of the world, especially for transport duty. This one had the blue UN flag painted on its side. “Hang on, everyone,” Cole said, and he engaged the collective, lifting the Black Hawk clear of the dirt.
Poti spread out below, shattered white buildings crowded against the sparkling waters of the Black Sea, a ruin that looked as dilapidated from the air as it did from the ground. Cole could almost imagine the stink of the place fading away as he followed the Hip toward the northeast.
“That guy’s really traveling,” Cole said. The Hip was already a good three miles ahead of them, a black spot just above the horizon. “Wonder if he’s trying to make up for lost time?”
“Maybe so.” Dombrowski pulled out a map from under his seat, folded and attached to a clipboard. “So where to today? Cha-something, they said?”
“Chaisi,” Cole replied. Another last-minute change, decided on just last night by the team’s leaders. “Little village up in the mountains, just outside the NFZ.”
“Outside the no-fly zone? Oh, joy. We get to play tag with Hind gunships today.”
“None have been sighted so far,” Cole told the copilot. “In fact, from everything I heard last night, it looks like the Russian regulars really have pulled up and stolen away into the night. Not so much left behind as a crust of black Russian bread. Piece of cake.”
“Shit. That just means we’re gonna be staying here, L-T! Maybe we should scare up a Hind or two. Might mean we get pulled back to the ships.”
“I’m not sure which is worse,” Cole said. “Sleeping on those damned cots at Tara, or being cooped up aboard a hip-pocket aircraft carrier.”
“Man, look at those mountains,” Dombrowski said, changing the subject.
One particularly rugged range was thrusting up in front of them, its jagged brown walls only a few miles distant now. “We’re not going over that thing, are we?”
“Nah. There’s a valley.” He pointed at the Hip, now reduced to a tiny spot far ahead and to the right. “See? Two-seven’s headed straight for it.”
“Christ,” Dombrowski said as the valley opened up around them. Trees flashed past to left and right, some reaching well above the Black Hawk’s cockpit. “Just like the trench on the Death Star in Star Wars.”
“At least,” Cole said with a grin, “we won’t have Imperial fighters on our tail!”
He wished, though, that Two-seven would slow down a bit. He didn’t want to get lost in these mountains, and with radio silence, he couldn’t call the bastard and tell him to slow down.
Muttering an imprecation against all bureaucrats, Cole opened the throttle a bit wider.
CHAPTER 7
“Bird Dog, Bird Dog, this is Watch Dog Six-one. Do you copy, over?”
The E-2C lurched as it hit a pocket of turbulence, but Lieutenant Arnold Brown was as oblivious to the jolt as he was to the steady drown of the Hawkeye’s twin turboprops. He was hunched over his radar console, his full attention focused on yellow splotches of radar returns painted there.
“Bird Dog, Bird Dog, this is Watch Dog Six-one. Do you copy, over?” he called again.
The E-2C was orbiting a fixed point fifty thousand feet above the Black Sea, its sophisticated electronics keeping track of air activity across a circle nearly five hundred nautical miles in diameter. As an Airborne Early Warning aircraft, it wasn’t quite as versatile as the land-based AWACS, but the Navy “Hummer” could do things no other AEW plane could do. Specifically, it could fly off of a carrier deck, and with a tracking capacity of over 250 targets it was well suited to warn the ships and planes of a carrier battle group of any activity that might pose a
