The civilian was at the controls.
There was a roar from the Pave Low as the rotors bit through the thin air and the helicopter disappeared beneath the level of the cliff top. Shabanov rushed forward and watched as it arced towards the ground and disappeared behind a pall of smoke billowing up from the caravanserai. He waited for the explosion, but it never came. The vortex wake of the Sikorsky’s rotors parted the smoke in time for Shabanov to see it heading straight for one of the outhouses further down the wadi. The helicopter’s tail boom glanced the roof of the building but the machine kept going. With a sickening feeling that it was too late to make any difference, Shabanov yelled at his missileman.
The sharp tone of the SA-9’s infra-red seeker head locking onto the hot exhausts of the Sikorsky was audible even over the din of exploding ammunition in the valley below. The operator steadied the missile launch tube on his shoulder and adjusted his aim.
‘Fire it!’ Shabanov roared.
There was a deafening crack as the missile left the tube and shot into the valley.
A screech filled the cockpit and a whole section of the instrument panel lit up as the inbound SA-9 tripped the automatic alarm system rigged to the missile-approach warner on the helicopter’s boom.
‘Holy Jesus,’ Ulm said.
Girling, still wrestling to steady the Pave Low after the glancing blow to the roof, thought they were about to crash.
‘We’ve got a launch.’ Ulm saw the white dot winking on the approach warner panel. ‘It’s probably an SA-9, a heat-homer, and it’s coming in fast on our six.’
‘What do I do?’ Girling shouted.
‘Pray.’
‘Can’t we fire flares?’
‘The counter-measures aren’t armed,’ Ulm said. In the rush to get airborne, he’d forgotten to prime them. And it was certainly too late now.
The screech warbled with each course deviation of the missile. Its seeker head was struggling to maintain a lock on the Sikorsky’s engine exhausts through the smoke of the battlefield. But still it came at them.
Girling’s whole body was braced for the SAM’s imminent detonation. When an explosion blossomed in the window in front of them, he was convinced they had been hit.
Instead, the screech from the approach warner intensified. The missile was still there.
The billowing flame ahead was a truck’s fuel tank blowing up, the flames rising like a geyser fifty feet into the air.
Even before the colonel yelled the command, Girling banked the helicopter straight for the fountain of fire.
The dot converged with the helicopter at the centre of the panel. Ulm looked up just as the cockpit windows were engulfed.
For a moment neither man could breathe as the fire sucked the oxygen from the air around them. The sky and the ground disappeared as the helicopter was lost in the conflagration.
Girling heard the explosion behind him. When he opened his eyes, the Pave Low was streaking through clear sunshine between the cliffs.
The screech stopped.
Girling snatched a glance over his shoulder. Through the open ramp he could see a crater where the burning truck had been. The SA-9 had homed straight in on it, the force of its exploding warhead snuffing out the flames.
With the tips of the blades and the belly of the helicopter no more than a split-second’s flying time from the rocks, there was no time for self-congratulation. Girling flew on, knowing that he was just as capable of killing them as any SAM.
Shabanov was pounding up the cliff path again, his men behind, when the air above him reverberated with a new sound. The second Sikorsky rose up from behind the outcrop that had shielded it from view, pirouetted before them and dropped down onto the clear patch of scrub where the first machine had been stationed. Shabanov made it on the ramp before the Pave Low had even settled onto the ground and rushed forward to the cabin. He turned to check all his men were on board, then opened the door in the bulkhead and shouted to the pilot to head the other helicopter off before it reached the coast and the enemy ships that lay somewhere beyond.
The wadi walls rushed at Girling faster than reason. His instinct was to lift the Sikorsky out of the valley, but a voice at the back of his head reminded him about triple-A and SAMs. The Russians might be a way behind him, but Girling knew that if he flew high, away from the ground, there was still enough hardware in Southern Lebanon to knock him out of the sky.
Girling gripped the cyclic so hard his fingers bled. For the moment, his entire world consisted of the control column and the narrow tunnel of airspace through which he coaxed the MH-53J. When the valley became too narrow, he eased the helicopter a little higher, but still he hugged the contours of the earth. Like a robot, he pulled back when the land rose and pushed down when it fell. By the time he first considered the matter of navigation, he had been in the air for almost five minutes. And in all that time, he realized, he’d been heading God knows where.
Keeping his eyes fixed on the terrain ahead, he yelled at Ulm to give him a bearing for the coast.
From out of the early morning mist a shadow metamorphosed as a minaret and Girling slammed the cyclic to port. There was a flash of white masonry and the obstruction whistled past a few feet beyond the end of the rotor tips. Girling steadied the helicopter and flew on towards the indistinct horizon. His arms had turned to jelly.
Some ingrained instinct had kept him flying away from the sun, heading him west, towards the coast. But he had no idea of his position. Somewhere in the maze of instrumentation ahead of him there was an indicator that fed constantly updated co-ordinates of his position via satellite, but he did not know where it was, much less how to plot a course from here to safety.
He snatched a glance to his left. Ulm had slumped against the cabin door. Girling reached out and pulled the American towards him.
Ulm groaned.
‘Don’t black out on me, Colonel.’
The American opened his eyes. There seemed to be very little comprehension behind them.
‘You’ve got to guide me to the ships,’ Girling said, his voice desperate.
Girling thought Ulm was going to pass out on him again. Instead, the American leaned forward, primed the counter-measures and turned on the radar warning receiver, the RWR. ‘This thing starts yel-ling at you… get lower. Start punching chaff.’
‘How?’
‘There’s a switch on the cyclic. Controls both the chaff and the flares.’
Girling prised his fingers off the control column. He found the rocker switch with its worn writing just beneath his thumb. Forward for chaff, the tinsellike substance for spoofing radar-guided SAMS; back for flares, used against heat-seeking missiles.
Both of the decoys were contained in a panel, half the length of a man, in either side of the rear fuselage. There were some forty flares and twenty chaff bundles in each dispenser. All Girling had to do was select which decoy he needed, toggle the switch and fire them out the side of the helo.
‘If we’re really in the shit, hold the switch down and you ripple fire all the decoys at once. But we’re talking last resort, OK?’
‘The fleet, Ulm. How do I find the fleet?’
‘Hit coast and turn north. Keep the beach on your right. Five miles north of Sidon… only large coastal town around here… turn east. You’ll reach fleet in-’
Ulm passed out.