Bookerman banked the MH-53J around a rock stack and hauled back on the cyclic to align the helo with the narrow wadi ahead.
‘GPS has gone again,’ Karanski said matter-of-factly.
‘No shit,’ Bookerman said. They’d been having problems with the Global Positioning System. Every time he banked the Pave Low past forty-five degrees in one of these sheer-sided wadis the GPS receiver on top of the fuselage lost its fix on the satellite that beamed them their co-ordinates.
‘Inertial nav has got it covered,’ Karanski said, his eyes on the multi-function display in the centre of the instrument panel. Whenever the GPS winked out, the inertial navigation system cut in to keep the mission computer updated on their position. The nav system, some said, was the very heart of the MH-53J Pave Low III. Unless you could plot your way into the target area with pin-point precision, there wasn’t a whole lot of point in taking off.
Bookerman kept his eyes on the FLIR screen. It took a lot of practice, hundreds of hours hugging the New Mexico desert, or strapped in the mission simulator, learning how to interpret the green and black contrasts of the FLIR. Even now he didn’t find it easy. There was always the temptation to look up out of the window. Whatever happened, though, he had to control that urge. He watched another rock stack form in the centre of the TV screen. Were he to look for it with his bare eyes through the clear Perspex windshield he would find only a wall of blackness, an infinite void. He wouldn’t catch a glimpse of the stack, even as they ploughed into it at close to two hundred miles per hour.
Of course, if the Pentagon had invested in cockpit lighting that was NVG-compatible, then he could be wearing goggles like the rest of the crew. Were he to wear them, however, the instrument lights on the panel in front of him would fry his eyes as the NVGs turned each innocuous dial into a searchlight. They were due to have had the new lighting installed months ago, but due to the budget cutbacks the programme had stalled. And, of course, because of Panama, the Pathfinders weren’t too high on the Pentagon’s priority funding list.
The rock stack shot out of the picture. Bookerman felt its presence somewhere off to his right, but he didn’t look up.
‘That was pretty fucking close,’ Sweet said over the intercom.
‘Don’t fucking swear so much,’ Karanski said. ‘How close?’
‘About five feet from our fucking tips,’ Sweet said.
Karanski turned to Bookerman. ‘Did you get that?’
Bookerman didn’t answer.
‘I said, did you get that, Bart?’
‘I got it.’
‘Are you all right?’
Bookerman’s jaw pounded on the wad of gum between his teeth. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘Sure?’
‘I’m not overloaded, if that’s what you’re driving at.’
Sometimes a pilot got so much information thrown at him that his brain could shut out life-or-death information. Bookerman had heard of pilots in the Gulf War who were so wrapped up in their mission that they never even heard the warning shouts of their comrades. A data recorder recovered from a shot-down F-15E in Southern Iraq showed that the WSO had been merrily flying the old precision-guided bomb down the cross-hairs on his TV screen, his mind set on destroying that mobile Scud launcher, while his escort was screaming at him to punch out chaff and flares and take evasive action. The first the F-15E crew knew about it was when the SA-9 flew straight up the right-hand tail-pipe. Thanks and goodnight.
He adjusted his course fractionally, lining the helicopter up as best he could on the valley’s centre-line.
Until this mission came along, Bookerman was beginning to think that professional life had passed him by.
He’d joined the Pathfinders in 1986 after a distinguished, if short, career with Military Airlift Command, flying AC-130 gunships. After transitioning to helos on the UH-1, he gradually moved up to the MH-53J Pave Low III, graduating on CH-3Es and CH-53As along the way. Bookerman had just finished learning everything there was to know about low-level penetration missions at night and in bad weather when Panama came along.
On that fateful night, he’d inserted Ulm and the rest of the hit team into the jungle without a hitch. As much as he wanted to blame Ulm for what happened at Los Torrijos, he realized that it could have happened to anybody. But the Pentagon wanted a scapegoat and they’d all been tarred with the same brush. C’est la guerre, Bookerman mused. While other USAF Pave Low units were rushed to the Gulf to ready for war, he had had to sit it out in New Mexico, champing at the bit whenever he heard of a coalition aircraft downed behind enemy lines. Rescuing pilots was just one of the many missions for which the Pathfinders had trained him.
The ultimate humiliation came on the night that Ulm told him, his voice quavering with emotion, that the Pathfinders had been picked to wet-nurse Soviet officers on an exchange programme formulated as part of the politicians’ vision of a New World Order.
Bookerman was no great fan of the Russians.
He pulled the helicopter out of the valley and the desert opened up before them.
‘How’d we do?’ he asked Karanski.
The co-pilot peered at the digital read-out on the multi-function display. ‘Thirty-seven seconds out, Bart.’
‘Shit!’ Shabanov would have his guts for any timing discrepancy beyond the half-minute mark. He pulled up to a hundred feet and bled off some speed.
‘What are we going to do?’ Karanski asked.
‘What’s our fuel like?’
‘Two thousand two hundred gallons.’
‘Then we do it again.’
There were muttered protests from the three scanners. They had been in the air for four hours, most of the time at low level. It was unrelenting work. No one could afford a lapse in concentration. A blink of the eye at the wrong moment and they were all dead.
Bookerman pushed the stick forward and the helicopter plunged back towards the desert floor. Life at thirty feet. What a bitch.
‘Time to first way-point?’ Bookerman asked.
‘Two minutes, twenty-three seconds. You should have it on screen any second. I’ve got it on radar.’
Bookerman screwed up his eyes against the black and green TV picture. There, right on the periphery of the stabilized FLIR camera’s range, was their entry point into the mountain range. The two peaks, known locally as the Devil’s Horns, were so distinct the way their summits arched towards each other. They would show up like neon signs on Karanski’s terrain-following/terrain-avoidance radar screen.
‘We’ve got company,’ Leiffer said suddenly.
When acting as scanner, Leiffer’s position was on the Sikorsky’s rear ramp.
‘What kind of company?’ Karanski asked.
‘Another helo. About half a mile back. On our six and a little ways out left. He’s tailing us at about five hundred feet.’
Karanski turned to Bookerman. The skipper’s face was drenched with sweat.
‘Are you getting any of this?’ Karanski asked.
Bookerman kept his eyes glued to the FLIR. He chewed his gum rhythmically. ‘Uh-huh.’
‘Any ID on our friend?’ Karanski asked Leiffer.
No answer.
‘Who is that guy back there, John?’ Karanski repeated.
‘Can’t tell, sir. There’s a lot of shit from our downwash. I can’t get a clear view. I can see navigation lights reflecting off his rotors, though. It’s a helo, not fixed-wing.’
‘I can’t see shit either,’ Sweet said. He was positioned on the wrong side of the helicopter.
‘I see him,’ Salva said. ‘Man, he’s right behind us.’
‘Come on, Salva. What the fuck is it?’