The transmit seemed to be working, and he was getting out everything he
knew--the location of the Hind, the fake nationality, the attack on the
frigate. But was anybody picking it up? The heavy Soviet radio was
rapidly drawing down its batteries, but he figured it was now or never.
Get it out quick and hope, he thought. Pray some Navy ship in this part
of the Aegean will scan it and raise the alarm.
He was still trying to piece it all together when he spied the figures,
approaching from far down the central walkway. Three men dressed in
black, looking just like a hit squad. He had not expected so fast a
response, and for a second he was caught off guard. They must have been
monitoring the radio.
If you had any sense, he told himself, you'd have expected that. You're
about to have some really lousy odds.
The Hind was armored like a tank, he knew, and even the bubbles over
the cockpit and the weapons station were supposedly bulletproof. How
bulletproof, he guessed, he was about to learn.
With the three men still a distance away, he realized he had only one
choice. Although he had never actually flown a Hind, this seemed an
ideal time to try and find out how difficult it was.
Probably harder than he knew. He reached up and flicked on the fuel
feeds, then pushed the starter. To his surprise, there came the sound
of a long, dull whine that began increasing rapidly in intensity and
frequency. The main rotor had kicked on--he could tell from the
vibration--and the tail stabilizer, too, if the rpm dials were reporting
accurately.
All right, he told himself, the dial on the right side of the panel is
rotor speed. Keep it in the green. And over to the left is engine
speed. Come on, baby. Go for the green. Red line means you crash and
burn. Pedals, okay. But this isn't like a regular airplane; the stick
is cyclic, controls the angle of your blades.
The instruments were now on-line--temperature, fuel gauges, pressure,
power output. The two Isotov turboshafts were rapidly bringing up rpm
now, already past three thousand. He grabbed hold of the collective,
eased back on the clutch, and felt the massive machine shudder, then
begin to lift off.
As the three men breached the gate leading into the asphalt-paved
landing area, a fusillade of automatic-weapons fire began spattering
off the bubble windscreen, leaving deep dents in the clear, globelike
plastic.
So far, so good, he thought. It's holding up to manufacturer's specs.
Now for the power. It's controlled by the collective, but when you
increase power you increase torque, so give her some left pedal to
compensate.
The Hind had started to hover, and now he moved the columns to
starboard, bringing it around. He could not reach the weapons station,
but the 12.7mm machine gun in the nose had an auxiliary fire control
under the command of the pilot.
With his hand on the stick, he activated the fire button. He might not
be able to hit anything, but he'd definitely get somebody's attention.
. . .
The machine gun just below him erupted, a deadly spray that knocked
sparks off the hurricane fence surrounding the pad as the chopper
slowly revolved around. Somewhere now off to his left came a new burst
of automatic fire. He found himself in a full-scale firefight, trapped
like a tormented bull in a pen.
But the Hind was up and hovering . . . and also beginning to slip
sideways because of the damaged wing. He grappled with the collective
pitch lever in his left hand, trying to regain control, but he didn't
have the experience. The chopper was now poised about ten feet above
the ground, its engines bellowing, nosing around and drifting
dangerously.
He'd lost control. As it tilted sideways, the fence began coming up at
him, aiming directly for the nose bubble. Even more unnerving, though,
was the heavyset terrorist in a black pullover who was standing
directly in front of the bubble and firing his Uzi point-blank. Worse
still, he was handling it like second nature.
The plastic splintered with a high-pitched shriek as the rounds caught
it head-on. The curvature had helped before, but now the gunman was
able to fire straight into it. The game was about to be up.
He ducked for the floor of the cockpit just as the bubble windscreen
detonated, spewing shards of plastic both outward and inward. Now the
helicopter was coming about and lifting off again, pulling up strands
of the wire fence that had gotten tangled in the landing gear.
No time to worry about it. He rose up, grasped the collective, and
urged more power, trying to compensate for the torque. But the mottled
gray behemoth was increasingly unstable, shunting sideways, drifting
over the security fence and spiraling upward toward the mountain that
bristled with SatCom's communications gear. The gunner holding the Uzi
slipped in another clip and raised up to finish him off, but at that
instant Vance squeezed the fire button one last time and the man danced
a pirouette, disappearing from view.
As he started to spiral in earnest, more automatic fire ricocheted off
the fuselage. Then came a sickening whine.
The stabilizer, he thought. They must have hit the damned stabilizer.
This is going to be a very short trip.
Panic caught him as the Hind started into autorotation, round and round
like a bumper-car ride at an amusement park.
He cut the power--hoping he could bring her down using the energy stored
in the blades--then quickly put the right pedal to the floor, held the
collective down, and tried to keep rotor speed in the green. He was
drifting to the east now, headed for a copse of trees halfway up the
mountain.