Without hesitating he marched brazenly towards the helipad entrance, praying his confident gait would allay suspicion. He reached the rack of flight suits, selected the longest and pulled it on. He tightened the lifejacket and donned a helmet, closing the visor so his face was concealed.
He snatched a duffel bag and picked up one of the Barrett sniper rifles. He had observed Dalmotov assembling the weapon and quickly found the locking pin. He detached the stock from the receiver and slid them both into the bag. Stacked alongside were cartons labelled BMG, the 50 calibre Browning Machine Gun round. Jack took a handful of the massive 14 millimetre cartridges and shoved them in beside the weapon.
After zipping up the bag he continued resolutely towards the hangar entrance. Once there he squatted down to survey the scene while pretending to adjust an ankle strap. The tarmac was hot to the touch, the summer sun having burned away the rainwater from the night before. In the glare the buildings of the compound seemed scorched and overburdened with heat like the surrounding hills.
He had already decided which helicopter to go for. The Werewolf was the most sophisticated, but was parked with the Havoc at the far edge of the heliport. The Hind was only twenty metres in front and being prepared for flight. It had been a workhorse of the Russian war machine and the snout with its stepped tandem cockpit exuded reliability.
He straightened up and walked over to a crew chief who was feeding a belt into the ammunition loading port.
“Priority orders,” Jack barked. “The schedule has moved forward. I am to leave at once.”
His Russian was rusty and heavily accented, but he hoped it would pass muster in a place where many of the personnel were Kazakhs and Abkhazians.
The man looked surprised but not unduly taken aback.
“The weapons hardpoints are still empty and you have only four hundred rounds of 12.7, but otherwise we are ready to go. You are cleared to mount up and begin pre-flight checks.”
Jack slung the duffel bag over his shoulder and climbed through the starboard door. He ducked into the cockpit and manoeuvred into the pilot’s seat. He stashed the bag out of the way. The controls did not look as if they would present too many problems; the overall configuration differed little from other military helicopters he had flown.
As he strapped himself in, Jack looked out through the canopy. Over the bulging Plexiglas of the gunner’s nacelle he could see a group of fitters wheeling two flatbed trolleys, each laden with tube launchers for the Spiral radio-guided anti-armour missile. The Hind was being loaded up for the final assault on Seaquest. At the same moment he glimpsed two men in flight suits coming towards him from the hangar entrance, evidently the Hind’s pilot and gunner. The instant he saw the crew chief pick up his cellphone and raise his eyes in alarm, Jack knew his cover was blown.
The giant five-blade rotor was already vibrating, the twin 2,200 horsepower Isotov TV3-117 turboshafts having been warmed up as part of the pre-flight routine. Jack scanned the dials and saw the tank was full and oil and hydraulic pressures were up to mark. He prayed fervently that Aslan’s anti-aircraft defences had not yet been briefed to shoot down one of their own. He gripped the two control sticks, his left hand pulling hard on the collective and twisting the throttle and his right hand pulling the cyclic as far back as it would go.
In seconds the beat of the rotor rose in a mighty crescendo and the Hind lurched into the air with its nose angled down. For a few agonizing moments there was no movement as it strained and bucked against the force of gravity, its efforts drummed out in a deafening cacophony that reverberated off the buildings around the helipad. As Jack skilfully worked the pedals to keep the machine from sliding sideways he caught sight of a great bear of a man running out of the hangar and roughly pushing aside the two dazed airmen. Dalmotov did not even bother with his Uzi, knowing the 9 millimetre rounds would splatter harmlessly off the helicopter’s armour plating. Instead he raised a much more lethal weapon he had grabbed on his way through the hangar.
The first 50 calibre BMG round smashed straight through the forward gunner’s nacelle, a position Jack would have taken had he known the helicopter was dual-control. As the machine suddenly sprang forward, a second round hit somewhere aft, a jarring impact that swung the fuselage sideways and forced Jack to compensate with an extra burst to the tail rotor.
As he wrestled with the controls, the helicopter rose over the hangar and clattered with increasing speed towards the southern seawall. To his left he could see the futuristic complex of Aslan’s hillside palace and to the right the sleek lines of the frigate. Moments later he crossed the perimeter and was over the open sea, the undercarriage skimming the waves as he kept low to minimize his radar profile. With the throttle at maximum and the cyclic jammed forward, he soon reached the helicopter’s maximum sea-level speed of 335 kilometres per hour, a figure he was able to boost slightly after finding the lever that retracted the undercarriage. The shoreline was now receding rapidly to the east, and ahead lay only the cloudless morning sky merging into a blue-grey haze on the horizon.
Fifteen nautical miles out, Jack pressed the pedals that controlled the tail rotor and pushed the cyclic to the left, gently easing the helicopter round until the compass read 180 degrees due south. He had already worked out how to activate the radar and GPS unit and now programmed in the co-ordinates for the island he had memorized on Seaquest three days previously. The computer calculated the remaining distance at just under 150 kilometres, a flight time of half an hour at present velocity. Despite the high fuel consumption, Jack had decided to maintain low altitude and maximum throttle, the fuel tanks over this distance providing ample margin.
He activated the autopilot and opened the visor on his helmet. Without pausing he lifted the duffel bag and began to assemble the rifle. He knew he could not afford to let his guard down for one moment. Aslan would do all in his power to bring him back.
CHAPTER 25
Bring the helicopter to a standstill and await escort. Comply immediately or you will be destroyed. You will not be warned again.”
Jack had heard the voice only once before, cursing gutturally in Russian, but there was no mistaking Dalmotov’s heavily accented delivery as it crackled through his headphones. Jack had kept the two-way radio on throughout the flight and had been expecting contact as soon as his pursuers came within range. For the past ten minutes he had been monitoring the radar screen as two red dots converged on him from the north, their speed and trajectory leaving no doubt they were the Havoc and Werewolf from Aslan’s base.
He was only ten nautical miles north of the island, less than five minutes’ flying time away. He had sacrificed maximum speed by keeping low over the waves to suppress his radar profile, a gamble that had nearly paid off. Despite its age the Hind was marginally faster and more powerful than the other two machines, but they had gained on him by flying at a higher altitude where there was less air resistance.
As well as a fixed 30 millimetre high-speed cannon and two twenty-round pods of 80 millimetre rockets the Havoc and Werewolf each carried a lethal combination of laser-guided air-to-air and anti-ship missiles, weapons Jack had seen in the loading bay. By contrast the hardpoints on the Hind’s stub wings were empty, the only firepower coming from the trademark four-barrelled 12.7 millimetre machine gun in the chin turret. It was a potentially devastating weapon, a mass killer in the Afghan and Chechen wars, but in the absence of a gunner Jack could only operate it on a fixed trajectory over open sights. At a cyclic rate of 1,200 rounds per minute per barrel, the four one-hundred round belts of armour-piercing would only allow a five-second burst, enough to cause colossal destruction at short range but scarcely sufficient to take on two such formidable adversaries.