“Somebody’s shooting at us!” Dallas yelled from the back, and another voice ordered them to hit the floor. Kat moved forward to the pilot and lifted his head, then lowered it, realizing her fingers were red with blood. There was a simple entry wound in his right temple.
More bullets whizzed through the cockpit, one barely missing her nose. She clawed away at the dead pilot’s seat belt and hauled his body out of the seat and into the back in one desperate motion.
Kat slid into the right seat, ignoring the blood, her left hand grabbing the collective control — a lever to the left of the seat with a motorcycle-style throttle in the handgrip. There was no time to debate whether she could fly the chopper without crashing; the alternative was to sit and die in a hail of bullets from unknown assailants. She twisted the throttle, boosting the rotor RPM, which was just below takeoff speed. She searched the instrument panel for the right gauge and found the rotor RPM needle coming out of the red as she pulled up on the collective. She felt the Huey stand up on its skids and lighten as the rotor bit into the air, the blades creating enough lift to counter the weight of the helicopter. Another quarter of an inch up and they were airborne, drifting backward as another slug ripped through, this time leaving a jagged hole the size of a large fist in the windscreen in front of her.
“Please, Jesus, get us the hell out of here!” Dallas’s voice moaned in the back.
Kat’s feet found the rudder pedals, and she pushed the left one hard now to swing the tail toward the shooters, masking the cabin. The trees on the eastern edge of the clearing were perhaps fifty feet tall, and she knew she would have to gain enough altitude to get over them before gaining forward speed.
The Huey wobbled violently as Kat worked the cyclic control stick between her legs back and forth, fighting for some semblance of control. She shoved the stick forward much too fast and the Huey responded by dropping its nose and changing its rearward motion to forward motion, trading some of the lift for forward speed as the ground rushed up toward the machine.
“Yikes!” she heard herself shout as she jerked the collective up again, barely missing ground impact with the forward skids.
The Huey rose again, but not fast enough, and the trees ahead rushed toward the nose as several more bullets pinged through the cabin.
Once again she pulled on the collective, taking the throttle as high as she dared. She felt the machine shudder as it clawed the air in obedience, and she realized they were not going to clear the trees.
The UH-1 hit the tree line with twenty knots of forward airspeed, the Huey’s huge rotor blades chopping through the top ten feet of the foliage as easily as a hedge trimmer through a bush. The blades mowed down the top five feet of an adjacent tree before the helicopter popped up over the remaining ones. It continued to climb and accelerate, apparently no worse for the experience.
“This… is supposed… to handle just like an airplane above forty knots!” she told herself out loud, remembering what her instructor had said several years back. She looked for the airspeed indicator and spotted it sitting on thirty knots and accelerating, as she worked the two controls to get the helicopter under control.
They were considerably above the trees now and stabilizing, the engine sounding steady with no warning lights visible on the forward panel — though the windblast was becoming a bother as she accelerated through fifty knots. She checked to make sure she was flying an easterly course back to Da Nang, and kept climbing.
Someone appeared at Kat’s left elbow and she glanced over to see Robert MacCabe, his eyes huge as he looked at her. “Thank God you’re a helicopter pilot, Kat.”
She shook her head. “I’m not. I have almost no idea what I’m doing.”
He looked at her with disbelief, and she smiled. “Welcome to my first helicopter solo. I only have a fixed-wing license. I do have an instrument rating, though.”
“Will that help?”
“No.”
“Oh, wonderful. Can you land?” he asked.
“Don’t know. Never tried. Should be interesting.” She smiled again, amused by his discomfort. “Is anyone hurt back there?”
“Well, Steve has a new part in his hair, but other than that, no.”
“What?” Kat asked, only half paying attention.
“One slug almost nailed Steve, but all it did was take a line of hair off the top of his head. It’s superficial.”
“Thank heavens.”
“That doesn’t include the poor pilot, of course. He didn’t make it. Do you have any idea who was shooting at us?”
She shook her head, the motion causing her to move the stick too abruptly, almost knocking Robert off his feet.
“Sorry. No, I don’t know. I never saw them. It came from the right. The people you’ve been evading may have come in by road.”
He was nodding. “Probably. What can I do to help you?” he asked.
She turned and grinned. “Pray a little? Or maybe open the operations manual to the chapter on how to land, and read it to me very slowly.”
Robert MacCabe shook his head. “Okay, now I am terrified!”
The frantic efforts of the three men at the western end of the clearing to yank the camouflaging vegetation off the HU-1 took less than two minutes. The pilot jumped in the right seat and hit the Start switch as the last branches came off, bringing the rotors up to takeoff speed as fast as he could. Arlin Schoen pulled himself in and slid the door closed just as the pilot lifted off, accelerating in the direction of the departed Huey to the east, while the men in the back reloaded their guns.
“Maximum speed! Whoever’s flying that crate isn’t an experienced pilot. You should be able to catch him.”
The pilot nodded, barely clearing the trees at the east end as he used the engine’s best effort to gain speed first, then altitude, bringing the Huey above a hundred knots, the blades slapping the landscape ahead with a horrendous noise.
Within five minutes the outline of the other helicopter appeared on the horizon, moving at half normal speed.
“How do you want to do this, Arlin?” the pilot asked.
“Come to their five o’clock position, stay one ship high, and I’ll guide you.”
“You gonna try for the engine?”
Schoen shook his head no. “He might be able to autorotate and put it down. No, I need to get the rotor hub and put them completely out of control.”
“That rotor head’s a pretty tough assembly, Arlin. I’m not sure we’ve got enough firepower.”
“Okay, what do you suggest?” Schoen asked.
The pilot motioned ahead. They were less than a mile now and closing.
“If I stick our skid into their blades near the center, I may be able to knock them down.”
“Jeez! How about us?”
“It’s a risk.”
“No. We go back to Plan A. I’m gonna shoot. Bring me in.”
Schoen moved back and slid open the left door, securing himself to a safety strap. His partner did the same. Schoen cocked the Uzi slung around his neck and checked the .45 automatic in his belt. When they were less than a hundred yards away, he could see the pilot intermittently through the window. Schoen realized with a start that it must be a woman. Her chestnut-colored hair was whipping around and streaming partly out of the broken side window.
Schoen motioned to his pilot to come forward a bit more, then hold position as he took careful aim at the rotor hub assembly and squeezed the trigger.
Kat felt a sudden series of staccato impacts in the Huey’s controls, and an echo of something outside the right window. Dallas could feel it as well, and moved to the right to press her face against the glass of the sliding door.
“There’s another helicopter back there,” Dallas yelled. “He’s firing at us!”