Shabanov sat on the jump seat behind his pilot and co-pilot, eyes straining for a glimpse of their quarry. While the pilot pulled up for a snap visual sweep of the skies around them, his co-pilot monitored the RWR, looking and listening for any trace of a search radar, or worse still, a missile fire-control system.
Shabanov barked orders for every man to scan the skies for the fleeing MH-53J. They all knew that finding and destroying the Sikorsky was their only chance of returning home. General Aushev had left no provision in his scheme for failure.
The pilot turned and shook his head. There was nothing else in the sky.
Shabanov thought fast. Ulm had a choice. Either fly south to Israel and risk negotiating one of the best air-defence systems in the world, or stick to plan, fly east and find the US Sixth Fleet.
‘Make for the coast,’ Shabanov said.
‘He may already be there, Comrade Colonel,’ the pilot said. ‘The coast is less than fifteen minutes away.’
‘Are you telling me you can’t outfly a civilian?’
The pilot responded by locking the helicopter onto the most direct course for the coast. He adjusted the power to full boost and pushed the Sikorsky down, away from the SAMs and triple-A. The scrub terrain whipped past the belly of the helicopter at three hun-dred and twenty kilometres per hour.
A near miss with a rock outcrop prompted the co-pilot to switch the terrain-following radar from ‘stand-by’ to ‘search’. He also turned on the FLIR, flicking it alternately from infra-red to low-light TV in an effort to determine which mode best cut through the early morning mist.
The pilot switched the range scale on the radar picture and saw the hills give way to a short stretch of coastal plain. Beyond that, the sea disappeared off the edge of the screen.
They were less than five minutes’ flight time from the coast when the co-pilot gave a warning shout and pointed to the FLIR screen. Shabanov craned over his shoulder. The co-pilot had the monitor in infra-red mode. In the centre was the unmistakable outline of a helicopter, its engines showing up as shimmering black heatspots. The co-pilot brought up the magnification and the shape grew into the other MH-53J.
‘He’s coming in on an almost perpendicular course,’ the co-pilot said. ‘From the north-east.’
‘Cut him off,’ Shabanov said.
‘Then what, Comrade Colonel?’
‘We pull alongside and shoot him out of the sky.’
The smell of the sea was strong on the warm wind blowing through the open window in the cockpit.
‘Two minutes to intercept,’ the co-pilot called.
Girling could see waves breaking on a beach a few miles beyond the nose of the Sikorsky. He pushed the helicopter lower, preparing to adjust his course onto a parallel heading with the coastline. Suddenly, the cockpit filled with a sharp audible warning and the RWR panel in front of him lit up like Broadway. He held his breath, convinced that, at any moment, the helicopter would be hit by a SAM, or rocked by the blast of radar-guided triple-A. In the midst of his fear, he remembered what Ulm had said about counter-measures. He hit the button beneath his thumb and knew that somewhere behind the helicopter little bundles of radar-spoofing chaff would be billowing into the slipstream.
The audible warning kept on coming, cutting through his concentration. He spotted a switch on the RWR panel labelled ‘audio’ and turned it off. The noise stopped immediately, but he could see the threat still winking at him on the panel — a flashing box with the alpha-numerics ‘E-2C’ beside it. It took him a few seconds to realize that the helicopter was being swept by an airborne early-warning Hawkeye from the Sixth Fleet. Girling knew that Ulm’s mission was so secret that the Sikorsky’s IFF transponders would have been switched off for the duration of the flight. He hoped somebody on the Hawkeye had been briefed to look out for them.
Unaware that the radio was dead, he was preparing to raise the Hawkeye on VHF when he spotted a second box winking on the flat-panel display. He peered at the screen, anxious to identify the threat to his left. Unlike the Hawkeye, there was no recognition code beside the box. All he could tell was that something was painting his RWR with radar signals and it was closing fast.
He adjusted course until the E-2C was dead ahead, though impossible to tell how far. He began to pray that the crew was vectoring a couple of Navy fighters towards him. For Girling knew now why the radar emitter on his nine o’clock bore no identification. It was an MH-53J, just like his. The Russians were right on his tail.
The sound, shrill and piercing, exploded in the cockpit. Wide-eyed, Girling swept the instrument panel, hoping it was only the ground-proximity warner, but he was too high and, in any case, this was a sound he knew already.
He spotted the warning light. It was pulsing ‘missile alert’, over and over. The clock-face of the missile-approach warner indicated it was heading for his left-hand rear quadrant.
Girling banged the stick hard to the right and pushed the helicopter down. He was so close to the waves that salt spray showered the Perspex. A snaking trail of gunfire lashed the water in front. There was no missile. The RWR had picked up the storm of bullets from the Russians’ miniguns.
A last look at the threat warner told him there were no F-14s to rescue him. He was on his own.
The Soviet-crewed helicopter had had only one chance for a snap-shot before the other Sikorsky banked away beyond the deflection of its guns.
Shabanov roared his disgust with his crew, then ordered the pilot to slip into Girling’s wake.
Using the low-light television on super-magnification, Shabanov was able to gain a perfect close-up view of the helicopter.
The ramp was down, but no one was manning the minigun station. He could see right through the hold and into the flight deck. Ulm’s body slumped listlessly, his hanging head silhouetted in the frame of the doorway. The pilot he could not see, but that did not matter. Shabanov already knew that the man was inexperienced. It was a miracle he had kept the Pave Low in the air this long.
The slipstream rushed through the open unmanned windows in the helicopter’s hold; loose straps and canvas seats flapped like streamers in the wind. Clearly discernible on the floor was the trussed form of the Sword, his head supported by parachute packs.
He was either unconscious or dead. Shabanov wanted to remove the element of doubt.
The Sikorsky was utterly defenceless. It remained for them to manoeuvre alongside and blast it out of the sky with a prolonged broadside from the mini-guns.
The co-pilot turned to him and announced that they were being painted by a US E-2C Hawkeye. From the strength of the signal he judged it to be about fifty miles ahead.
Shabanov was unconcerned by the American radar plane. He told the pilot to pull all available power from the engines, haul parallel with the other helicopter, and hold a close course while he and the ramp gunner poured thousands of rounds into the flight deck and hold.
The colonel moved back and briefed the rear gunner before assuming position in the window immediately aft of the flight deck.
He stuck his head into the slipstream and watched as the other Sikorsky drew closer. He checked the minigun, rotating its six barrels slowly just to make sure there was no malfunction.
Everything was in perfect working order.
Girling threw a glance over his shoulder and saw the Soviet-crewed Pave Low creeping up on his tail, as predatory as a deep-water shark. It was so close that its nose filled the frame of the ramp opening, so close he could see not just the flight crew, but the darkened forms of soldiers on the cargo deck beyond. Fifty feet below, the sea boiled under the vortex of the machine’s six-bladed main rotor.