Either way, the combination of these three factors gave the small helicopter force an open sky through which to infiltrate.
Norton just couldn’t help wondering during the flight, though, if the Iraqis knew something about flying at night that he didn’t.
The unit flew for exactly ninety-three minutes, over flooded marshes, rugged hillsides, vast desert.
At 2340 hours, Norton’s GPS scope began beeping. They were nearing their landing zone. He flipped down his NightScope eyepiece and sure enough, he could see the huge mountain of Ka-el looming in the distance.
But there was a problem.
A big problem.
On the other side of the mountain was a cloud of sand so large, it looked like a tidal wave rolling in on a beach.
Norton began blinking his navigation lights madly—and soon saw Delaney flying right beside him start blinking his in return. Now the other three choppers were signaling as well. They all saw the gigantic sandstorm. The question was, what to do now?
But this really wasn’t a question at all. There were no other options. They didn’t have enough gas to turn around and go back—not without a risky nighttime air-to-air refueling.
So they had no choice.
They had to keep going.
Norton was the first one to descend through the sandstorm.
His heart was beating right out of his chest. The love affair with the Hind was on hold for the moment. High winds were buffeting the Russian chopper all the way down. It sounded like he was being hit with a million rocks, especially around the canopy. He hoped the much-ballyhooed protection for the Hind’s power plants would prove true. Just one gust of sand sucked up into the copter’s engines, and it would be lights out forever.
Four hundred feet from landing and he was fighting the controls mightily. The Hind was great at going forward, but hovering was not one of its fortes. He was doing his best to keep the chopper level, but his biggest problem now was not the fiercely blowing sands, but something more devious: disorientation.
Keeping an airplane steady in relation to the ground was a hard enough job. Holding a chopper level in zero visibility was a real chore. It was really a mind-over-matter thing. The eyes won’t believe what the instruments are telling them, and the pilot puts the aircraft in a position he thinks is level. Trouble is, the instruments are almost always right—and the pilot’s instincts almost always wrong. There were recorded instances of chopper pilots running into sandstorms or heavy rain and actually turning themselves upside down—until they tried to land or went into a mountain. Disorientation was like breathing. If you thought too much about it, you got all fucked up.
At that moment Norton was trying his best not to think about either.
The chatter from his radio was not helping. All attention to security gone, the Army Aviation pilots were calling out numbers and positions to one another in breathlessly clipped fashion, a sure sign the pilots were getting stressed. Even Delaney was sounding a little nervous, yelling out his altitude readings as if the very sound of his voice was enough to will his chopper to the ground in one piece.
But finally, just like that, Norton broke through the bottom of the storm. He caught a quick, glimpse of the cliff face, and knew that he was much lower than he’d thought and going way too fast. He immediately gave the stick a yank and increased power. The front of the chopper bucked upwards, slamming his helmet against the top of canopy.
A second later, there was a mighty bump, a bounce, and a large crashing sound. And then nothing.
He was down.
Norton began frantically shutting down all the crucial systems aboard the Hind, lowering his electrical exposure as quickly as he could. His headphones were filled with the stern relief of the other pilots as they too broke free of the sandstorm and came down on the deck— hard, but at least in one piece.
“Truck One down!”
“Truck Two down… copy.”
“Pumper down… and breathing…”
“Damn! Ouch … Hound Dog Two here …”
Norton smiled a moment. The last report was from Delaney. His chopper bounced in not a hundred feet from Norton’s own. His partner was just barely visible through the continuing swirl of sand.
Then the radios went silent again.
The wind got louder; the sandstorm was descending on top of them now. All sight of Delaney and the other choppers was quickly gone. Norton rechecked his control panel; everything that had to be shut down was off. Only the bare minimum of instruments were still lit.
He did a quick GPS check and confirmed that they had come down in the middle of the grid they had planned for. They were on the vast cliff halfway down the high mountain. The satellite systems never lied.
He killed the GPS screen, and found himself suddenly surrounded by complete darkness. The sand swirling, the wind screaming the aircraft rocking back and forth. Darkness…
He hated it.
But then an idea hit him. He turned on his NightScope and sure enough, he could see the Marines, pouring out of the choppers, some of them going into their defensive ring despite the howling winds. Others he could see running up to the waterfall of vines and pulling them aside. Thank goodness, there was a cave behind them.
“Hot damn!” Norton heard himself say for the first time in his life.
The next thing he knew, he was moving. He pressed his face against the cockpit window and saw two ghostly faces staring back in at him. They were air techs, two of the dozen who were part of the mission. All twelve were all around his chopper now. They were pushing it toward the cave opening. Just as they were supposed to.
Once inside the cavern, Norton could finally see again. He just stared out at the place. It was enormous, as big as if not bigger than Hangar 2 back at Seven Ghosts Key. The Marines already had a generator hooked up, and now some very dim bulbs were burning within. It gave everything, and everyone, a very ghostly appearance. And true enough, he could see bats fluttering around on the ceiling of the place.
Norton could hear voices and lots of banging. Finally he reached over and undid the clasp on his cockpit window. Someone on the other side flipped the glass door upwards. It was Delaney.
“Welcome to Bat Cave,” he said.
Chapter 20
The sun rose hot and burning over the hard desert.
The night had passed without incident in the cave. The Marines had dispensed a battery of motion detectors all over the flattened cliff as well as hanging many over the side of the mountain itself. Two squads of Marines had spent the night out on the ledge. Well hidden in their unmarked, Iraqi-style camouflage uniforms, they had set up powerful NightScopes, one pointing in just about every direction possible from the cliff’s location. The combination of the motion detectors and the NightScopes gave them eyes and ears that extended out for miles.
About a half mile from the base of the mountain, there was a highway that ran east to west. It was known to be little traveled, and true to form, not a single vehicle was seen on the roadway all night. In fact the unit’s electronic picket line had detected no movements—other than nocturnal animals—anywhere near the hiding spot.
By 0500, Norton and Delaney were ready to go.
The air techs had worked all night getting the Hinds in shape to do the first recon flight. Most of the long hours were spent extracting sand from critical systems. Norton and Delaney did their own extensive preflight inspection as well. Their weapons check went well, as did a communications test. Everything seemed to be in order aboard the tough Russian gunships.