yard here in Samara but won’t reach the mine until tomorrow.”
Cali returned from the bathroom. Mercer dashed in quickly, urinated, and washed his hands and face. Rather than risk drinking the water, he dry swallowed a couple of painkillers. The swelling in his groin had gone down significantly and the pain was little more than the discomfort of sitting so long.
They reached an exterior door that Federov opened theatrically for Cali. On the tarmac loomed a military helicopter, a massive MI-8 transport chopper, perhaps the most successful rotary wing aircraft in history. At eighty-two feet long and eighteen high it dwarfed the men lounging next to the open door. They snapped to easy attention when they saw Federov approaching.
The Russian captain gestured for Mercer and Cali to take seats along the starboard wall and showed them how to fix their helmets. “Sorry they do not have radios, but they will protect your hearing.”
Seated along the flanks of the helicopter’s cargo deck were six soldiers kitted out for combat with AK-74s and a pair of RPG-7 rocket launchers. There were also five others aboard, and while they wore olive green jumpsuits, Mercer believed they were the civilian scientists under Sapozhnik. In the back of the utilitarian hold were crates for tents, food, water, and biohazard equipment.
Federov took his seat and jacked his helmet into the helo’s intercom. A moment later the onboard APU wound up and ignited one of the Klimov turboshafts. The second engine roared to life and the helicopter began to buck under the strain of her own power plants. The pilot engaged the transmission, and the five sagging rotor blades began to beat the polluted air. They vanished into a blur and the shaking increased so that Mercer had to clamp his jaw. He felt Cali’s hand find his. It nestled into his palm like a little creature seeking safety in its den.
The shaking suddenly eased as the pilot gently lifted the eleven-ton chopper from the crumbling apron.
Mercer peered out the yellowed Perspex window as the helicopter gained height. The city lay under an industrial pall from dozens of huge factory complexes as it clung to the shores where the Samara River dumped into the Volga, the largest river in Europe. Although the Volga was many times the size of the Ohio or Allegheny, Mercer had to admit the city of three million did look a bit like Pittsburgh.
The flight to the Samarsskaya Gypsum Mine was monotonous. The steppe slowly gave way to ugly hills of fractured granite, worn smooth by time so they looked bald, denuded. The valleys weren’t particularly deep and what timber had once grown in the region had long since been harvested, so the trees remaining were stunted and gnarled. The land was muted shades of gray and dun and the sky was particularly cheerless.
As Federov had predicted, it took two hours to reach the mine. For the last twenty minutes of the flight they flew directly over the rail spur that serviced the installation. The rails were shiny streaks in the otherwise murky landscape. The mine’s machinery and headgear, the crane that raised and lowered mine cars into the depths of the earth, were perched near the top of a long valley. The mine shaft itself was a black square in the gray stone that descended into the mountain at a shallow angle. About a quarter mile from the headgear was a clutch of small buildings, administrative offices and housing for the miners when the mine was in operation. Now they were abandoned and crumbling.
The facility had been a bleak, forlorn place even before the ravages of decades of neglect.
Near the valley floor was the rail depot with ore-loading hoppers straddling the tracks. A half-mile-long metal chute connected the two parts of the complex. A broad dirt road switchbacked down to the valley floor, occasionally passing below the ore chute. The train Federov had said wouldn’t be there until the following day was backed into the depot. There was a bright orange TEM16 diesel-electric locomotive from the Bryansk Works and a string of eight boxcars. Pale blue smoke vented from the engine’s exhaust and a few men milled around the locomotive. Several more worked near the open door of one of the boxcars.
Mercer glanced at Sasha Federov and didn’t like the puzzled look on his face. He looked back at the train, at Federov again, and quickly unbuckled his seat belt even though the chopper was making its landing approach in a large open area adjacent to the mine’s towering headgear.
“That’s not your train,” Mercer shouted at the Russian. “It’s a trap.”
Federov nodded grimly and yelled into his microphone at the pilot.
The missile came from behind, a perfect blind ambush. While a notoriously inaccurate weapon beyond two hundred yards, the RPG-7 lifted from its tube less than seventy yards behind the hovering MI-8 just as it reached its most vulnerable position. Covering the distance in less than a second, the five-pound warhead should have impacted squarely under the helo’s tail boom, but Mercer’s instincts and the pilot’s quick reaction heeled the chopper over just enough so the projectile slammed into the fixed landing gear. The explosion came a microsecond later.
Most of the detonative force blew away from the chopper, but enough blasted into the MI-8 to tear a sizable hole into her rear cargo compartment. Hot gas and molten aluminum from the helicopter’s skin ripped through the men and women inside the compartment, killing the two soldiers at the end of the bench seat outright and severely injuring three more. Something sheared the drive shaft to the aft rotor because suddenly its contra-rotating force was gone. The chopper began a dizzying spin through the sky.
Mercer had been tossed across the cabin when the pilot threw the MI-8 onto its side and now was pinned up against Professor Sapozhnik and two of his scientists. The world outside the small portholes whirled by as the chopper corkscrewed from the sky. Cockpit alarms blared over the roar of her engines and the cabin was quickly filling with smoke.
Over the din of screams and the lingering effects of the explosion that had partially deafened him, Mercer heard the ping of small arms fire against the helicopter. Whoever had sprung the trap wasn’t taking any chances. In the fleeting seconds before the big cargo chopper plowed into the earth Mercer’s mind turned to the perpetrator. He knew it was Poli who’d ordered the helicopter shot down. What he didn’t know, what had nagged at him repeatedly since first crossing the mercenary in Africa, was how he was always a step ahead.
“Crash positions,” Sasha screamed.
Most of the passengers were too paralyzed to move. A few of the soldiers wrapped their arms around their knees and ducked their heads. Just before they hit, Mercer saw Cali do the same and smiled. She’d doubled her chances of survival by protecting the fragile bones of her neck from the shearing forces of a crash. Mercer snaked his arm into Sapozhnik’s safety belt and held on as the blades ripped into the gravelly soil above the rail spur, not far from the mine’s entrance. The tips threw up a cloud of dust before they disintegrated. The pilot managed to torque the chopper ever so slightly so she came down not on her side but at a slight angle.
The damaged landing gear collapsed as it took the helo’s weight, and the blades gouged deeper into the soil until they blew apart, thrown like javelins across the mine site. The MI-8 slowly rolled onto its side, burying one of the air intakes for her Klimov engines in the ground. It sucked up rock and dust and debris, choking off the turbo shaft. The engine bellowed for a moment, then fell silent. The second engine cut off almost immediately but smoke continued to thicken in the hold.
For the moment Mercer couldn’t hear automatic weapons ripping into the chopper’s thin skin, and even if Poli still had them in his sights the chance of aviation fuel catching fire was too great to use the helo as a redoubt.
Mercer stood shakily. Bodies lay strewn across the cabin and for a panicked moment he thought he was the only survivor, but he soon saw slow movement. He looked to Cali. With the helicopter on its side, she was on her back, still strapped to her seat. She was pale and there was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth where she’d been struck by the soldier next to her, but her defiant expression told him she was all right. Mercer was on Professor Sapozhnik’s lap. He looked at the man’s face. His mouth was slack, his eyes open and sightless. His neck was clearly broken. The scientist next to him was also dead. A boulder had punched through the MI-8’s side when it rolled over, and crushed the back of his skull. His head lay in a thickening pool of dark blood.
Mercer looked up to where Sasha Federov dangled from his safety straps. He was alive and working to release the belt’s catches. Trusting that the Russian officer would open the cargo door, Mercer moved closer to Cali. “Are you okay?” he asked, using his finger to gently wipe the blood from her full lips.
“They’re going to be even puffier after this.” She coughed. The smoke was as dense as Tiny’s on a Saturday night.
“I’ll think only pure thoughts.” He unsnapped her belt and helped her to her feet.
The uninjured soldier was already checking on his comrades. He was wasting precious seconds on a man who was clearly dead.
